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mdstamper.bsky.social
Michael
@mdstamper.bsky.social
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Sharing inspiration featuring #WomenInArt … and for those with time or interest to learn more: detailed #artText in the #AltText including art history & artist stories with all respect & credit to the talented artists & museum curators.
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“Marguerite Pilot of Deep River (Girl with Mulleins)” by Yvonne McKague Housser (Canadian) - Oil on canvas / c. 1936–40 - McMichael Canadian Art Collection (Kleinburg, Ontario) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #YvonneMcKagueHousser #Housser #McMichaelCanadianArtCollection #WomenPaintingWomen
Marguerite Pilot was an Indigenous woman from Deep River, Ontario. She sits outdoors as if in thought with quiet authority and her presence honored not as a type or symbol, but as a person held in her own dignity and story. Canadian artist Yvonne McKague Housser’s modernist handling using simplified planes, restrained outlines, and carefully balanced color lets background landscape function less as “scenery” than as emotional weather. The young Marguerite is shown from the waist up, set outdoors against a wide, pale lake and layered blue-green mountains. She has medium-brown skin, straight black hair cut to the shoulders with a neat side part, and dark eyes sharing a steady, guarded calm. She wears a sleeveless, sunlight yellow dress that catches soft light, its brushwork visible in thin, chalky strokes. Her arms fold across her torso, one forearm angled up, the other resting low, creating a closed, protective shape that also feels like self-possession. On her left hand is a small turquoise ring. To the left, tall mullein stalks rise like candles, their yellow blooms and broad leaves painted in thick, emphatic greens. Dark conifer silhouettes punctuate the shoreline as rolling gray clouds press down, making the blues of the hills feel deeper and Marguerite’s presence more immediate. Her crossed arms and direct gaze hold a tension between being looked at and looking back, as if she is deciding how much of herself to yield to the portrait. Mullein, a hardy plant long associated with folk remedies and roadside endurance, becomes an eloquent companion because it signals healing, resilience, and a kind of stubborn persistence in place. Painted between 1936-1940, when Housser was an established teacher and a founding member of the Canadian Group of Painters including taking sketching trips and, in 1939, traveling to Taos to study dynamic symmetry, this portrait carries the confidence of a mature artist and the complexity of a subject who will not be sentimentalized.
January 3, 2026 at 11:49 PM
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“Burnout Culture” by Amani Haydar (Lebanese Australian) - Acrylic on canvas / 2019 - Museum of Art and Culture, yapang (New South Wales, Australia) #WomenInArt #AmaniHaydar #أماني_حيدر #Haydar #MACyapang #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #art #artText #acrylic #LebaneseArtist #WomenPaintingWomen
With the title “Burnout Culture,” this portrait reframes burnout as a social condition rather than an individual failing. The composition reads like two climates at once: depletion and heaviness on the left, urgency and heat on the right, as if the world beside her is constantly on fire. A front-facing woman fills the center of the canvas, her gaze direct yet weary. From each eye, vivid blue tears stream down in heavy saturated drips. She wears a layered hijab in cream and honey tones, outlined in dark lines that sharpen each fold around her cheeks and neck. Her skin is modeled in warm browns and tans with cool shadows under the eyes and along the jaw as thick brows frame her dark, reflective eyes. A patterned dress of deep cobalt dotted with red and scattered with yellow leaves adds a bright, restless rhythm across her torso. Behind her, the space splits: on the left, a flat brown field and dark smoke while on the right, a pale sky erupts into curling ribbons of red, pink, orange, and yellow flame. The still figure and the burning background collide, making the body feel held upright under pressure. Those electric tears refuse restraint. They insist that exhaustion and grief are visible, bodily realities. Lebanese Australian artist and advocate Amani Haydar (أماني حيدر) has spoken about returning to art when words felt unsafe, and her memoir The “Mother Wound” (2021) traces trauma, domestic violence, and systemic inequality. In that context, the woman’s steady stare becomes a form of witness as she does not perform “resilience” for comfort. Instead, she asks us to notice what burnout is made of like unpaid care, gendered expectations, cultural pressures to stay composed, and institutions that reward overextension. The flames might be external demands and the tears their private cost. Together, they point toward a harder question: what would it take to build a culture where rest and safety are not earned, but expected?
January 3, 2026 at 6:16 PM
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“Finlandaise (Finnish Woman)” by Sonia Delaunay-Terk (Соня Делоне) (Ukrainian-born French) - Oil on canvas / 1907–1908 - The Israel Museum (Jerusalem) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #SoniaDelaunay #СоняДелоне #Delaunay #IsraelMuseum #artText #UkrainianArtist #WomenPaintingWomen
Painted soon after Ukrainian artist Sonia Delaunay’s arrival in Paris, France in 1905, this early portrait shows her testing the expressive color she absorbed from Post-Impressionism and the Fauves. Before the abstractions and “simultanism” she later developed with Robert Delaunay, she worked with faces exploring if hues can become mood and temperature. A young woman sits against a wallpaper-like field of oversized flowers and curling vines. Her hair is pulled back tightly, with a dark ribbon tucked behind her head, and she wears a simple, rose-pink top that fills the lower half of the canvas. Delaunay builds the face from broad, flattened planes of cool turquoise and slate blue across the forehead and cheek, olive and mossy greens along the jaw and neck, plus warm tan and coral around the nose and eyes so the unidentified woman’s features read clearly even as the colors refuse naturalism. Thin, dark outlines sharpen her eyelids and lips as her eyes look off to our right, steady and self-contained. Behind her, blues, reds, and greens repeat in petals and leaves, echoing the portrait’s patches of color and making figure and background feel woven together. Brushstrokes stay visible in the blouse and background, and the close, decorative setting heightens the feeling of a private, paused moment. The woman’s skin is deliberately nonliteral and mapped in color blocks so the portrait is both likeness and experiment. Shadows appear as shifts from yellow to green, while the floral backdrop presses forward, as if the air itself were patterned. Throughout, her expression stays quietly pensive, with a closed mouth and half-lidded gaze. The title “Finlandaise” may hold a personal echo because Delaunay spent childhood summers in Finland, and the floral field feel like a remembered textile or room, enclosing the sitter in patterned intimacy. In this painting, identity is less documentary than poetic like an invitation to meet a young woman’s presence while letting color speak.
January 3, 2026 at 7:32 AM
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“Stickers” by Zoe Satayathum (American) - Acrylic on hardboard / 2023 - Ohio Governor’s Youth Art Exhibition (Columbus) #WomenInArt #ZoeSatayathum #Satayathum #PortraitPainting #AcrylicPainting #studentArt #womensart #BlueskyArt #ContemporaryArt #artText #art #EmotionalRealism #WomenPaintingWomen
A tight portrait shows a young woman with warm medium skin and long brown hair tied into pigtails with red ribbons. She presses both hands into her cheeks so the palms gently compress her cheeks. One eye is clear and alert while the other is puffy and bruised-looking, with mauve and violet shadowing around the lid and under-eye. Her mouth is closed, lips slightly pursed, the expression suspended between boredom and endurance … more “I’m here” than “I’m fine.” Across the skin, playful stickers interrupt the realism like a second, louder language: a green “A”, a blue “B”, and a yellow “C”; a big yellow smiley face on the forehead; small hearts and flowers; a teardrop sticker under one eye; tiny starbursts; a small white cat face sticker on her nose; and a red apple near the chin. The background is soft pink streaked with vertical drips of yellows, greens, blues, and lilacs sliding downward. The sitter’s white sleeve is built from thick, creamy strokes. The overall effect is a body rendered with care, and then “decorated” with symbols that insist on being read. At the time, high school artist Zoe Satayathum shared, “I love to express emotions and feelings in my art that I can’t put into words.” In “Stickers,” the “words” our world recognizes are cute icons, grade letters, and a smiley face while the face carries the emotion those icons can’t contain. The A-B-Cs could be language basics, but on her skin they echo evaluation as if being sorted, ranked, and understood through simple labels. The smiley sits like an expectation to perform happiness while the teardrop and swollen eye refuse that script. Even the hands become symbolic as a visible effort to steady oneself. Satayathum uses childhood imagery as camouflage over something bruised and real. The pastel drips behind the figure like feelings such as time slipping, mood running, or a story leaking through the surface. Satayathum said “There is no correct type of art or style … as long as you follow your passion.”
January 3, 2026 at 1:09 AM
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“The Woman” by Lubna Al-Tai (Iraqi) - Oil on canvas / 2019 - Al-Ghad Radio (Mosul, Iraq) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #LubnaAlTai #لبنى_الطائي #AlTai #AlGhadRadio #IraqiArt #Hamsa #art #artText #artwork #BlueskyArt #ContemporaryArtist #Maslawi #IraqiArtist #WomenPaintingWomen
A stylized portrait of a woman fills the canvas, rendered in bold, flat planes of color. Her face is painted in saturated reds and oranges, with large, luminous green eyes that look outward with a tired steadiness. A green headscarf wraps her hair and neck, edged with small gold dots. A decorative earring hangs from an exposed ear. In the foreground, a large open palm rises like a protective screen, painted in cool turquoise and deep green, with an almond-shaped eye set into the hand. Beside it, a second hand form appears as a geometric emblem, its shapes broken into triangles and blocks of yellow, teal, and red form a small red bird near the edge. Behind her, a half-circle fan of dark and light green segments crowns the scene, while an arched window and a balcony railing. The overall palette leans heavily into greens layered from emerald to sea-glass so the woman’s red face is both presence and alarm, as if she is lit from within. Created in Mosul in 2019, Iraqi artist Al-Tai (لبنى الطائي) links this woman’s gaze to a broader community of Maslawi women and frames the raised palm as a hamsa-like hand-shaped amulet of protection found across the Middle East and North Africa. The painting’s repeated “hand-and-eye” motif feels like a wish for safety made visible to ward off harm, refuse silence, and insist on being seen. Al-Tai notes that “Maslawi women were the biggest victims under Daesh-occupied Mosul,” and the fractured geometry throughout the composition echoes lives reshaped by occupation and aftermath including home spaces altered and bodies carrying memory. Yet the work is not only elegy as the greens mark endurance and renewal, and the small bright, alert, and perched bird introduces a note of survival. By placing an interfaith symbol of care (known variously as the Hand of Fatima, Miriam, or Mary) at the painting’s center, Al-Tai turns protection into a shared language for an image of communal guarding, and of a city’s women holding one another upright.
January 2, 2026 at 6:20 PM
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“Carry This In Remembrance Of Me” by Delita Martin (American) - Acrylic, charcoal, lithography, relief printing, decorative papers, & hand stitching / 2019 - Muscarelle Museum of Art (Williamsburg, Virginia) #WomenInArt #DelitaMartin #Muscarelle #WomensArt #WomenArtists #artText #WomenPaintingWomen
A young Black woman with dark black skin stands in three-quarter view, her shoulders angled left while her head turns back toward us. Her expression is serious and self-possessed with lips set and eyes steady. Short, tightly curled hair frames her face, punctuated by three rosette-like circles along the hairline. A veil of translucent turquoise dots washes over her forehead, cheeks, and neck, continuing down her torso. Some circles are crisp, others faint, as if the pattern is drifting. Behind her, the background becomes a dense constellation of circles in many sizes, so her body feels both separate from and woven into the field. She wears a strapless, pale dress tinted with icy blue, patterned with hand-drawn lavender rings and spirals like water on water. At her neck sits an expansive, dark collar that spreads across the shoulders like lace or leaves, its edges visibly hand-stitched. Nestled in the collar are circular medallions of layered paper and fabric with faint handwriting and numbers appear on them, including the plainly legible words “sold to.” The title echoes the religious phrase “do this in remembrance of me,” but Martin’s shift to carry turns remembrance into a burden and a duty. Made in the context of Muscarelle’s “1619/2019” exhibition on slavery and forced migration, this portrait treats memory as something living … and unfinished. The necklace’s “sold to” and ledger-like numerals evoke bills of sale and the paperwork of slavery, making the language of ownership impossible to overlook. By cutting, layering, and stitching those fragments into adornment, Martin re-authors the archive so what was once evidence of commodification becomes mourning and resistance. The cool blues and repeating circles (often linked in her practice to spirit space and feminine power) are veil and shield like an ancestral presence that protects the sitter’s interior life. Her unwavering gaze insists on presence over possession, asking us to remember with accountability.
January 2, 2026 at 7:14 AM
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“A Woman and a Car” by Arpita Singh (Indian) - Watercolor on paper / 1987 - Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, Massachusetts) #WomenInArt #ArpitaSingh #अर्पितासिंह #Singh #PeabodyEssexMuseum #IndianArt #WomenArtists #WomensArt #art #artText #BlueskyArt #IndianArtist #IndianArt #WomanArtist #WomenPaintingWomen
Indian artist Arpita Singh (अर्पिता सिंह) builds images the way memory works: not as one viewpoint, but as a crowded field where domestic life, street life, and private myth overlap. By the 1980s, she had returned to figuration with a language shaped by pattern including miniature-like detail, textile sensibilities, and the everyday. A brown-skinned, woman fills the upper half of this watercolor painting, her dark hair parted and braided into two thick plaits that fall like cords along her cheeks. Her almond eyes are ringed with warm reds and yellows, giving her an alert, inward-focused stare. A round talisman pendant rests at her neckline, while two strap-like bands cross her shoulders connecting to round patterned gear-like orbs. Behind her, an orange field glows like heat or late-afternoon light. Across it loops a thick, charcoal vine, braided with blue-green leaves and pale lilac blossoms, forming a wreath that both frames and encloses her. Small, floating motifs interrupt the floral rhythm like a profile head at the top right, a single watchful eye to the right, and a pink cameo-like face near her chest. Below, the picture turns into a mechanized scene. A dark car sits as if cut from metal, its circular wheels rendered as gears and dials on a road that curves up both edges. Inside the windows, two faces look outward like passengers caught mid-story. To the left, a vehicle with one person is moving up the gray stripe. To the right, a person on a bicycle is coming down the gray stripe. Singh signs dates the work “1987 Jan,” anchoring the dreamlike collage to a specific moment. The car may signal modern mobility and public space, yet it also feels like a sealed capsule, carrying faces while containing them. The flowering ring might be both garland and boundary. Her disembodied eye suggests scrutiny or awareness. Freedom, risk, desire, and duty share the same road for an intimate, female-focused map drawn in symbols.
January 1, 2026 at 10:13 PM
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“Gypsy Girl at Rest” by عفيفة لعيبي / Afifa Aleiby (Iraqi) - Oil on canvas / 2010 - Contemporary Art Platform (Kuwait City, Kuwait) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #AfifaAleiby #عفيفةلعيبي #Aleiby #ContemporaryArt #ContemporaryArtPlatform #BlueskyArt #artText #WomenPaintingWomen
As if viewed from overhead, a young woman reclines on a thin red blanket. Her long, dark hair fans out and her skin is painted in smooth, pale tones, with softly shadowed cheeks and a small mouth. She wears a heavy deep-blue coat dress with oversized brown lapels and large buttons, revealing a green-and-white striped interior. A thin gold chain holds a small heart-shaped pendant resting on her chest as a single hoop earring glints at one ear. Her right hand rests over her midsection, while her left arm lifts lightly, fingers relaxed, toward a tan tambourine set beside her. Scattered playing cards of hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds spill across the red surface near her elbow. On either side, vertical bands of green, leaf-like patterning frame the scene, intensifying a quiet, enclosed mood. Painted in 2010, this portrait turns “rest” into a kind of aftermath as the tambourine may suggest music, dance, and public performance, while the cards might hint at chance, risk, and the ways identity can be treated like a game to be read from symbols. The title’s use of the word “Gypsy” carries a long history of stereotyping Roma and other traveling peoples, but Iraqi artist Afifa Aleiby’s (عفيفة لعيبي) figure is not depicted as spectacle. Her unfocused gaze and unguarded pose hint at fatigue, contemplation, or a pause between acts rather than a role to be consumed. Aleiby, born in Basra and trained in Baghdad before studying monumental art in Moscow, has lived much of her life in exile, later teaching in Aden and eventually settling in the Netherlands. That transnational life, along with her interest in blending echoes of Renaissance painting, icon-like stillness, and social realism, often centers the female body as an image where beauty, politics, and belonging meet. Here, saturated red and protective green borders feel like a threshold between private refuge and the outside world, inviting us to consider who gets to name a woman, and what it means to let her simply be.
January 1, 2026 at 5:50 PM
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“舞妓 (Maiko Maiden aka A Dancer)” by 小倉遊亀 / Yuki Ogura (Japanese) - Color on paper (Nihonga) / 1969 - National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (Japan) #WomenInArt #YukiOgura #小倉遊亀 #Ogura #Nihonga #日本画 #Maiko #舞妓 #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #artText #artwork #京都国立近代美術館 #MOMAK #WomenPaintingWomen
A young Japanese maiko (an apprentice geisha) kneels in three-quarter profile against a cool, misty lavender background. Her face is a porcelain-pale oval with fine brows, almond eyes looking to our right, and vermilion lips. Her dark hair is swept into a glossy bun and crowned with kanzashi ornaments like clustered blossoms, a patterned comb, and dangling strands. Her cream kimono is sprinkled with tiny motifs of blossoms, fans, shells, and hexagonal crests layered over a pale blue hem that pools like water. A crisp red collar frames her neck as a red-patterned sash crosses her chest. Behind her, a deep green obi with gold geometric bands cascades in a long, weighted tail, contrasting with the kimono’s soft drift. In the lower right, the artist’s name “遊亀” and seal sit like a final stitch. Painted in 1969, “舞妓” or Maiko (often translated as “Maiko Maiden” or “A Dancer”) turns a figure of performance into an image of stillness. Japanese artist Yuki Ogura (小倉遊亀) pares the scene down to silhouette, pattern, and breath as the maiko’s hands disappear into sleeves, while textiles speak in her place via repeating hexagons, shells, and blossoms that hint at training, tradition, and the seasons of a young life. The airy, lightly gridded background is like shoji paper placing her at a thoughtful distance, suspended between rehearsal and role. At the time, Ogura was in her seventies and painting with late-career clarity. Trained under Nihonga master Yasuda Yukihiko, she rose through the Japan Art Institute exhibitions and in 1932 became the first woman elected to membership in that organization. She later married the Zen master Tetsuju Ogura and credited Zen practice with steadiness as an inner counterweight to public visibility. Shown at the 54th Inten exhibition in 1969 and later entering the Kyoto collection, this work holds two truths at once: the maiko as an emblem of Japanese tradition and a Japanese woman artist as a modern authority.
January 1, 2026 at 8:02 AM
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“Galla Girl Ornaments (Guiatu Abakora)” by Joy Adamson (Austrian-born British) - Watercolor on paper / c. 1950s - National Museums of Kenya Archives (Nairobi) #WomenInArt #JoyAdamson #FriederikeVictoriaGessner #Adamson #NationalMuseumsOfKenya #art #artText #WomanArtist #WomensArt #WomenPaintingWomen
A young woman with deep brown skin stands in half profile turning her head to meet us with a steady, guarded gaze. Her dark, tightly curled hair frames her face as one hand grips a long carved spear angled behind her shoulder. She wears pale metal bangles stacked on her forearm, vivid bead strands at her neck, and a wide silver, plaque-like chest ornament that glints with tiny rounded forms. At the top left, British artist Joy Adamson labels the sitter as “GUIATU ABAKORA,” and beneath it writes “BANGALI, GARISSA,” anchoring her to a specific place. The final word, “GALLA,” is a historical exonym often used for Oromo peoples. Today, it’s widely understood as outdated and can be experienced as insulting, so it is an archive term rather than a self-chosen identity. That tension between a named person and the categories applied to her sits at the heart of this watercolor. Adamson’s careful attention to adornment can be read as admiration for craft, status, and lived style so the jewelry isn’t decoration so much as biography, carried on the body in metalwork and beadwork. Yet, the written captioning also shows how easily a portrait can slip into ethnographic shorthand. The most human counterweight is Guiatu Abakora herself with her turned shoulders, lifted chin, and direct eye contact suggesting agency … as if she’s deciding how she will be seen, even within someone else’s labeling system to help us ask “Who gets to describe whom, and what changes when we keep the named person at the center?” The artwork is part of Adamson’s series of watercolor portraits of Kenyan communities, made as she traveled in the north and east of the country. The museum record does not publish an exact year of creation although Adamson’s cultural watercolors are generally dated to the 1940s through early 1960s, before her worldwide fame for the memoir “Born Free” about raising and returning a lioness named Elsa to the wild in what is now Kenya, alongside her husband George, a game warden.
January 1, 2026 at 12:59 AM
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“La Jeune Dessinatrice (Portrait of a Young Artist)” by Amélie Legrand de Saint-Aubin (French) - Oil on canvas / 1831 - Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto) #WomenInArt #AmelieLegranddeSaintAubin #AmelieLegrand #ArtGalleryofOntario #ArtText #arte #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #WomenPaintingWomen
A young woman with light skin and warm brown eyes sits upright in a leather armchair. She pauses mid-drawing and looks out with a composed half-smile. Her dark hair is arranged high in a looped Apollo-knot style and topped with an oversized black bow as short curls frame her temples. Around her neck, a translucent double ruff of lace spreads outward, fastened by a wide ribbon bow. She wears sparkling drop earrings and a dark green satin dress with dramatic gigot sleeves. A heavy gold link chain drapes across her bodice. On the table before her, an open sketchbook rests under her left hand. A gold band is visible on her ring finger. Her right hand holds a sharpened pencil poised over a lightly shaded landscape of hills, trees, and rocky ground suggested in quick marks. Behind her, a warm brown wall and a red curtain create a quiet interior stage for making art. Dated 1831, this gorgeous portrait insists on a woman as maker rather than just muse. French artist Amélie Legrand de Saint-Aubin focuses on the motion of hands, the sheen of satin, and the airy lace ruff by using a smooth technique to elevate art study into a public statement of competence. Women were often pictured drawing portraits or copying antique casts so a woman drawing a landscape indoors was far rarer, suggesting she may be copying a landscape painting, drawing, or print. The visible “wedding band” argues against this being a self-portrait as Legrand de Saint-Aubin never married and opens the sitter to possibly being a fellow student or colleague moving through Parisian studio networks. By this point, the artist was a regular Salon exhibitor and portraitist, and the sitter’s direct gaze reads as a claim to professional identity. Its acquisition by the Art Gallery of Ontario, and presentation in a women-artists exhibition, underscores how recovering such works reshapes who is allowed to be seen … and remembered … as an artist.
December 31, 2025 at 6:01 PM
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“Le Jour des Rameaux (Palm Sunday)” by Victorine Meurent (French) - Oil on canvas / 1885 - Musée Municipal d’Art et d’Histoire de Colombes (France) #WomenInArt #art #artText #arte #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #VictorineMeurent #Meurent #MuseeDeColombes #PalmSunday #WomenPaintingWomen
Palm Sunday (le Jour des Rameaux) opens Holy Week and in much of France, people carry small branches (often boxwood) home as signs of blessing, protection, and spring’s return. French artist Victorine Meurent distills that custom into a single, contemplative gesture, turning public ritual into something quietly personal. The close portrait shows a young woman in right-facing profile against a pale, cool gray background. She has light skin with a soft flush in her cheeks, dark eyes. Her thick, dark-brown hair falls in loose waves to her shoulders, with straight bangs skimming her forehead. She wears a simple high-neck black dress. Her right hand rises near her face, delicately pinching a sprig of glossy green leaves, likely boxwood or similar blessed greenery. Light from the left models her nose and chin and catches the edge of her knuckles, while the figure gathers into velvety dark tones. Her posture is upright yet inward-looking, head slightly inclined forward, eyes fixed on the leaves. The gesture is tender rather than theatrical with fingers curved, wrist relaxed, the leaves angled toward her. With no church, crowd, or interior, the painting invites attention to breath, touch, and the bright green against black. Soft transitions in the skin and a few livelier strokes in the hair make the scene alive. Made in 1885, this may be a claim to authorship. Meurent is one of the most recognizable faces in art through paintings made by other artists, especially Édouard Manet, including Olympia (1863), Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), Mademoiselle V… in the Costume of an Espada (1862), and Lady with a Parrot (1866). Yet, she trained, painted, and exhibited at the Paris Salon (including in 1876 & 1879). This Palm Sunday profile suggests a woman seeking less spectacle, but more interior life. Meurent later lived in Colombes (1907–1927), and the museum’s care for her work helps return her name to the wall as artist and not only a muse.
December 31, 2025 at 5:47 AM
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“A Girl in Red (Portrait of Gladys Ankora)” by Grace Salome Kwami (Ghanaian) - Oil on linen on canvas / 1954 - The Phillips Collection (Washington, DC) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomenArtists #GraceSalomeKwami #Kwami #art #PhillipsCollection #artText #GhanaianArt #GhanaianArtist #WomenPaintingWomen
Painted around 1954, on the cusp of Ghana’s independence era, this portrait treats an everyday working woman as a bearer of modern life. Gladys Ankora worked in artist Grace Salome Kwami’s family household in Achimota, and that proximity is felt via close cropping and an unshowy pose. Ankora faces forward against a muted olive-green ground. She is a young Ghanaian woman with deep brown skin, softly modeled cheeks, and a steady, direct gaze. Her dark hair is wrapped in a rose-red headscarf that frames her forehead and falls over one shoulder. A small gold, diamond-shaped earring catches the light, and a thin necklace rests at the base of her neck. She wears a vivid red and pink dress with a wide boat neckline. The fabric is patterned with pale starbursts that repeat across the bodice and wide collar. Kwami’s warm reds and browns are balanced by subtle highlights on the bridge of the nose, lips, and collarbone, giving the face sculptural presence. The sitter’s shoulders are squared and calm, her mouth gently closed, her expression composed. Paint remains slightly matte and textured, and the close cropping brings her near so cloth, skin, and light read as equally important markers of personhood. The background is brushed in thin layers of green and tan, like worn plaster, keeping attention on her face. Her chin lifts slightly, suggesting quiet resolve rather than performance. The starburst motifs echo across the neckline and bodice, creating a gentle rhythm that contrasts with the Ankora’s stillness. Kwami, known as “Da Grace,” trained at Achimota’s School of Art and Craft and persevered in a field shaped by gender bias, developing her own realism when modern African art histories were scarcely taught. By lingering on cloth, pattern, and gold, she links personal style to cultural identity, while Ankora’s presence refuses an exoticizing gaze. Gladys Ankora is presented as a specific person, dignified and self-possessed.
December 30, 2025 at 9:22 PM
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“Portrait of a Black Woman” by Lydia Cooley Freeman (American) - Oil on canvas / c. 1930s - Lenox Hill Hospital (New York) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomenArtists #LydiaCooleyFreeman #1930s #AmericanArtist #BlueskyArt #LenoxHillHospital #PortraitofaWoman #art #artText #WomanArtist #WomenPaintingWomen
Painted around the 1930s, this portrait is by Lydia Cooley Freeman, an American artist born in Tacoma, Washington, who studied at New York’s Art Students’ League with John Sloan and often signed as “Cooley.” An unidentified Black woman avoids our gaze against a softly brushed, gray-brown background. Her medium-deep brown skin is lit warmly, with cool green shadows along the bridge of her nose and under the eyes. She wears her dark hair in a sculpted, side-swept style with a broad wave arcing over her forehead, while the other side is pinned back in smaller curls. Her eyebrows are neatly shaped and her eyes are outlined in dark paint while looking slightly to our left, giving the impression of being lost in thought. Her lips are painted a muted red and held closed, calm but firm. She is dressed in a teal-green jacket over a high, ruffled blouse patterned with whites and blue-greens. The quick, visible brushstrokes leave edges unresolved, as if Cooley Freeman wanted us to feel the paint moving. The figure is cropped close with her shoulders and chest filling the frame so the sitter’s presence is intimate and the emphasis stays on expression, posture, and the dignity of being carefully seen. The spare background and brisk brushwork keep attention on the sitter’s individuality rather than on status or setting. In a period when Black women were often omitted from “official” portraiture or reduced to stereotypes, this close, steady framing is likely an act of respect. Shown at Lenox Hill Hospital within Northwell’s “Women Who Dared”collection, it serves as quiet company in a place defined by scrutiny. Her slightly averted gaze suggests boundaries like privacy and selfhood worth honoring in care.
December 30, 2025 at 11:13 AM
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“The Green Dress” by Jane Peterson (American) - Oil on canvas / c. 1920s - McNay Art Museum (San Antonio, Texas) #WomenInArt #JanePeterson #Peterson #McNayArtMuseum #PortraitofaWoman #AmericanArtist #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #BlueskyArt #artText #art #1920s #McNay #WomenPaintingWomen
Painted in the 1920s, “The Green Dress” captures a moment when women’s fashion and public self-presentation were being rewritten. Acquired in 2021 as the first American artist Jane Peterson painting to enter the McNay’s collection, the work expanded the museum’s American Modernism section amplifying women’s voices. Peterson, who trained in New York and pursued international study and travel throughout her career, brings worldly confidence so this portrait is stylish without being decorative while being quietly insistent on agency. A young woman with light skin sits turned slightly to her right, meeting us with a steady, unsmiling gaze. Her hair is cut into a crisp 1920s bob rounded at the jaw and painted in warm chestnut and copper tones against a cool, pale background. She wears a vivid green dress rendered in broad, fluid strokes with a soft white collar that frames her neck, and a dark neckerchief is tied loosely at her chest. A long, low-slung necklace with beads in deep green, ivory, and small flashes of orange drops down the center of her torso. The nearly square canvas heightens a sense of closeness. Behind her, the room dissolves into mint, gray, and teal paint with perhaps a doorway edge at left, and at right a hazy shadow. Peterson builds the face with confident blocks of cool blue-green shadows, rose on the cheeks, and sharp highlights so the portrait feels immediate, modern, and alert. The cropped haircut, relaxed neckwear, and elongated jewelry signal a new, mobile kind of elegance. Peterson’s modernism is less about distortion than about sensation to see how cool greens and quick, visible strokes can describe presence, mood, and light. The young woman’s direct look holds the center while the background remains deliberately unresolved, as if the world around her is in motion and only the subject’s self-possession stays sharp.
December 30, 2025 at 2:05 AM
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“Hindu Girl” by Ângela Trindade (Indian) - Oil on canvas / c. 1948 - Fundação Oriente (Panaji, India) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #AngelaTrindade #ÂngelaTrindade #FundaçãoOriente #FundacaoOriente #PortraitofaGirl #IndianArt #artText #BlueskyArt #Trindade #WomenPaintingWomen
A young woman stands at the edge of a shaded veranda, leaning her back against a wall. Her right arm bends up behind her head, lifting the edge of a red-orange veil (dupatta) that drapes over her hair and shoulders. She has light-to-medium brown skin, dark eyes, and straight dark hair mostly covered by the scarf. A small gold earring and a short gold necklace glint in the light. Her face is softly modeled, with a neutral mouth and a direct, steady gaze that meets ours without flinching. Her clothing layers muted blues, grays, and cream beneath the warm veil, tied at the waist with a translucent green sash. At her side sits a large earthenware water jar, its rounded shoulder catching a dim highlight. Behind her, pale columns and a distant railing open onto sunlit arches and rooftops of a courtyard washed in dusty pink and light browns. Broad, blended brushstrokes keep edges slightly hazy, as if heat and shadow are softening the scene. Her covered head and the vessel read as culturally coded signs of modesty and daily responsibility, yet her poised stance and unguarded eye contact give her a quiet authority. Her left arm falls down the side seam of her veil, fingers relaxed, as though the pose has been held only a moment. Painted around 1948, this portrait belongs to Indian (Goan) artist Ângela Trindade’s early figurative period, shaped by Western academic training in Bombay and by the example of her father, the legendary Goan painter António Xavier Trindade. Fundação Oriente notes that she copied several of his works, including a “Hindu Girl” tied to his 1930 Governor’s Award so this canvas feels like both homage to him and self-definition for herself. The jar and veil can signal gendered duty and modesty, yet the sitter’s frontal gaze refuses to be reduced to symbol. In the years around Indian independence, Trindade’s warm realism insists on presence … and a woman seen as a person, meeting us as an equal.
December 29, 2025 at 11:04 PM
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“Jane Mathilda Bolin” by Betsy Graves Reyneau (American) - Oil on canvas / 1944 - National Portrait Gallery (Washington, DC) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #BetsyGravesReyneau #BetsyGraves #Reyneau #NationalPortraitGallery #artText #BlueskyArt #JaneMatildaBolin #WomenPaintingWomen
This oil painting shows Jane Mathilda Bolin, an African American woman in her mid-thirties, seated in left profile but turning her head to meet our gaze. Bolin was the first Black woman to graduate from Yale Law School (1931) and, in 1939, the first Black woman appointed to a judgeship in the United States, sworn in by New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia. American artist Betsy Graves Reyneau traveled to New York in January 1944 to paint her, choosing professionalism with clasped hands, a turned body, and a gaze that refuses to soften. Her medium-deep brown skin is modeled with warm tans and cool shadows, emphasizing a focused, slightly furrowed expression that’s calm, guarded, and resolute. Bolin’s dark hair is swept up and back in soft rolls. She wears a vivid crimson coat with a high, turned collar and broad lapel. Its saturated red dominates the composition and catches subtle highlights along the sleeve and shoulder to become a declaration of visibility like authority made present, on her own terms. Her hands rest together in her lap, fingers interlaced, with neatly painted red nails. A wedding band and a wristwatch feel like practical jewelry. Behind her, a flat, deep teal background creates a stage-like stillness that pushes her figure forward. Light falls from the left, brightening her forehead and cheekbone, while the far side of her face recedes into cooler tones. No props interrupt our encounter do authority is carried in posture, restraint, and presence. Reyneau painted this portrait in 1944 for the Harmon Foundation’s exhibition “Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin,” which opened at the Smithsonian in 1944 and toured for a decade to counter racist stereotypes.
December 29, 2025 at 10:52 AM
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“Giuseppina” by Clara Klinghoffer (British) - Oil on canvas / 1934 - Manchester Art Gallery (England) #WomenInArt #ClaraKlinghoffer #Klinghoffer #ManchesterArtGallery #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #PortraitofaWoman #art #artText #BlueskyArt #BritishArtist #BritishArt #WomenPaintingWomen
Painted in 1934, this portrait balances realism with a deliberate, modern kind of refinement as British artist Clara Klinghoffer simplifies detail while heightening expression through contour, color, and pose. The title names the sitter as Giuseppina who is described in collection sources as a young Sicilian girl; however, the painting resists anecdote as there’s no obvious narrative prop and only a charged contrast of cool background and warm flesh, sculptural sleeves, and a vivid blue ring drawing our eyes to her hands. Shown from the waist up, a young woman, looks to our right, as if listening or thinking beyond the frame. Her skin is soft, pale-to-light tones with warm blush on the cheeks. Her features are refined and stylized including arched brows, long dark lashes, and a small mouth with glossy red lipstick. Her dark hair is smoothed back and gathered low at the nape, with a clean look emphasizing the elegant line of her forehead and neck. She wears a fitted dress in muted rose-brown and plum tones, with dramatic puffed sleeves and a slightly open neckline. Around the neck and cuffs, a textured band of golden-tan fur-like trim catches the light, echoing warmer notes in her face. Her hands rest together at the lower right showing red-painted nails and a prominent ring set with a deep blue stone. The background is a mottled blue-green field, brushed loosely so it creates an atmosphere rather than a specific room. That cool, sea-green backdrop makes her warm clothing and luminous face feel even more present. Klinghoffer, celebrated in her lifetime for formidable draftsmanship and psychologically alert portraiture, often gave her sitters a quiet, interior presence rather than theatrical gesture. Here, the turned head and distant gaze create a sense of privacy: we see her, but we don’t fully “have” her. In that tension—between display and autonomy—the work becomes not just a likeness, but a study of dignity, style, and the right to inwardness.
December 29, 2025 at 2:43 AM
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“Itaallanna korviga (Italian Woman with a Basket)” by Julie Hagen-Schwarz (Baltic German) - Oil on canvas / 1851–1860 - Tartu Art Museum (Estonia) #WomenInArt #art #artText #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #JulieHagenSchwarz #HagenSchwarz #JulieHagen-Schwarz #TartuArtMuseum #WomenPaintingWomen
A young woman stands among dense vineyard leaves and shadowy foliage as she looks directly at us with a soft, friendly smile. Her skin is painted in warm peach tones with rosy cheeks. Her dark hair is center-parted, and smoothed back as a small hoop earring catches the light. A red bead necklace circles her neck. She wears a creamy white blouse with a gathered neckline and voluminous sleeves edged with fine lace, over a deep red-brown bodice and a richly patterned skirt trimmed in green and floral bands. One arm lifts above her head to steady a heavy container on her shoulder brimming with pale and purple grapes, glossy orange fruit, and vine leaves, suggesting harvest time and Mediterranean abundance. With her other hand she gathers the skirt at her hip, as if pausing mid-step on a narrow path through the vines. Sunlight falls like a spotlight across her face, sleeves, and the fruit, while the surrounding greens dissolve into a dark, theatrical backdrop that frames her as both worker and celebrated beauty. Tiny details like the sheen on grape skins, the rough weave of the basket, and the fine embroidery at her cuffs are luminous. From the German-speaking region of modern day Latvia and Estonia, artist Julie Hagen-Schwarz was supported by a grant/scholarship to train in Rome from 1851-1854. She painted during a period when study in Italy signaled artistic ambition, yet women were rarely encouraged to claim that freedom. In 1851, she wrote that she wanted to “achieve greater things than my sex usually does,” and her career proved it. She built a major portrait practice and later became the 1st woman elected to the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg of the Russian Empire. Against that backdrop, this “Italian woman” is more than a picturesque type. The overflowing fruit suggests plenty, while her steady gaze asserts personhood via an encounter. Whether drawn from a local sitter or a studio model, she carries the dignity of work into the language of high art.
December 28, 2025 at 9:49 PM
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“Kimono blanco (White Kimono)” by Judith Alpi (Chilean) - Oil on canvas / c. 1919 - Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Santiago, Chile) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #JudithAlpi #Alpi #MuseoNacionalDeBellasArtes #MNBA #ChileanArt #BlueskyArt #ArtText #Japonisme #WomenPaintingWomen
Painted around 1919, this portrait shows Chilean artist Judith Alpi’s early command of modern intimacy. In her mid-twenties, freshly trained at Santiago’s Escuela de Bellas Artes and aligned with the Generación del Trece, Alpi balanced academic draftsmanship with a softened, atmospheric palette. A light-skinned woman sits on a low, blue-upholstered daybed. She has a sleek short black bob, red lips, and a calm, watchful gaze turned to our left. Her white kimono is loosely wrapped and dotted with pale pink blossoms as it drops in wide sleeves and opens to show one bare shin. Embroidered slippers repeat the floral tones. A thin bracelet and a ring add small flashes of shine. At her side, a large blue ceramic vase holds flowering branches above a table draped in patterned cloth. The room dissolves into cool gray-blue planes, letting the woman and blossoms be the quiet center of the painting. The kimono and blossoming branch nod to japonisme, an imported visual language that Chilean artists and collectors used to signal cosmopolitan taste, but the scene feels less like costume than chosen self-presentation. The sitter remains unidentified, but her relaxed crossed legs, visible skin, and sidelong look suggest a private room where she can inhabit elegance on her own terms. White cloth can be both refuge and spotlight while the small pink flowers, poised between bud and bloom, hint at transience and becoming. Alpi was also an avid collector of European and Chilean art, and her own practice returned again and again to portraiture … especially images of women artists and intellectuals. She later helped found the Sociedad Nacional de Bellas Artes and taught in several public institutions, shaping the next generation as well as her own. The painting’s early honors (including recognition in the 1919 Salón Oficial and a medal at the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition in Seville) underscore how seriously her contemporaries took women’s authorship in the public art sphere.
December 28, 2025 at 5:05 PM
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“Ung kikuyu-pige (Portrait of a Young Kikuyu Girl)” by Karen Blixen (Danish) - Oil on canvas / 1924 - Karen Blixen Museet (Rungsted, Denmark) #WomenInArt #KarenBlixen #Blixen #KarenBlixenMuseet #Kikuyu #IsakDinesen #WomensArt #DanishArtist #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #art #artText #WomenPaintingWomen
The Danish title “Ung kikuyu-pige” is often translated as “Portrait of a Young Kikuyu Girl.” Museum notes describes the sitter as renowned for her beauty and she reportedly married with a high bride dowry, but her personal name is not recorded, a reminder of how easily a life can be reduced to type. Blixen painted the work during her Kenya years, later revisited in her 1937 memoir “Den afrikanske farm (Out of Africa).” A young Kikuyu girl is painted from the shoulders up, turned left, her gaze lowered as if listening inward. Her deep brown skin is built with layered strokes of cool charcoal and violet shadows under the jaw and around the eye, warmer sienna and russet highlights along cheekbone and forehead l, so her face is luminous and calm rather than posed. Her eyelids are heavy, lashes darkened, and her mouth rests closed in a neutral, self-possessed expression. A broad headscarf wraps her close-cropped dark hair, banded in muted rose, beige, and smoky gray as a folded tail sits near an ear which has a big looped earlobe. Around her neck, a wide red collar encircles her neck and catches a thin pale glint at its edge. Two bead strands, one red and one blue, drop over her shoulders and cross her chest, adding crisp color against an earth-toned palette. Her bare shoulder is brushed in warm browns, with visible grain and dry-brush. Behind her, an even wash of sandy tan and pale gold is softly scumbled, creating an atmosphere keeping the sitter’s presence at the center. Born Karen Christentze Dinesen, Blixen is also known by pen names including Isak Dinesen, She began as a visual artist and carried that eye into her writing. She trained seriously in drawing in Copenhagen and took classes in Paris before Kenya reshaped her life. In the 1920s, she painted portraits and studies alongside the demanding work of running a coffee farm. After returning to Denmark in 1931, she set painting aside for literature; however, this portrait tells its story even to this day.
December 28, 2025 at 5:21 AM
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“Langweilige Puppen (Boring Dolls)” by Jeanne Mammen (German) - Watercolor & graphite on paper on cardboard / 1929 - Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Spain) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #artText #art #JeanneMammen #Mammen #GuggenheimBilbao #Watercolor #WeimarArt #WomenPaintingWomen
Made in 1929, as Weimar Berlin reckoned with shifting gender roles after World War I, “Langweilige Puppen” turns the “New Woman” into both subject and question. Bobbed hair and public smoking were signals of autonomy and style and become gestures that feel effortless yet rehearsed, as if modern identity must be performed. A Pierrot doll acts as a sly double as a stage figure whose fixed mask echoes the women’s controlled expressions, hinting at how femininity can be treated as costume, commodity, or role. Two stylish women fill the frame, their pale faces rendered with delicate graphite lines and thin watercolor washes. In front, a young woman with short, auburn hair and softly arched brows looks out with a cool, half-lidded gaze. Her red mouth is set in a calm, almost practiced expression. A faint blush of warm color touches her collar and shoulder, as if from makeup, light, or a stain. Behind her, another woman with a sleek black bob leans back, eyes nearly closed, puffing a cigarette between slender fingers. A long drop earring and a simple necklace punctuate her understated dress. At the left edge, a Pierrot-like doll with ruffled collar, buttoned torso, and blank eyes hovers in the smoky background, like a prop that has wandered onstage. The setting might be a café or cabaret corner of muted greys, taupes, and violet-browns that dissolve into haze. The women’s cropped hair, elongated eyeliner, and lacquered lips signal 1920s modernity with one meeting looking towards us and the other retreating into smoke and thought. The doll’s stiff costume contrasts with the living softness, intensifying the quiet ennui implied by the title. German artist Jeanne Mammen built her reputation in the 1920s as an observer and illustrator of Berlin city life, often centering women navigating cafés, streets, and nightlife with wit and resilience. The result is tender and unsentimental with boredom as armor, glamour as strategy, and self-possession as a hard-won kind of freedom.
December 27, 2025 at 9:32 PM
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“Anna May Wong” by Dorothy Wilding (British) - Hand-colored bromide print (by Beatrice Johnson) / 1929 - National Portrait Gallery (London, England) #WomenInArt #DorothyWilding #BeatriceJohnson #NPG #NationalPortraitGallery #art #artText #BlueskyArt #OldHollywood #AnnaMayWong #WomenPaintingWomen
Made in 1929, this portrait captures Anna May Wong (黃柳霜, Wong Liu Tsong) when she was reshaping her career in the U.K., seeking roles (like the London-set film Piccadilly) beyond Hollywood’s narrow stereotypes. British photographer Dorothy Wilding’s studio image was delicately painted over by Beatrice Johnson that turns a publicity photo into something closer to a painting. The young Chinese American woman sits composed and self-possessed. Her skin is light with warm undertones as a soft blush warms her cheeks and nose. Dark, neatly shaped brows frame half-lidded eyes that glance sideways. Her hair is cut into a glossy black bob with blunt bangs that arc across her forehead. She wears vivid red lipstick with a crisp cupid’s bow, and the same lacquer red appears on her fingernails. A pale yellow lightly-wrinkled dress shows under a shimmering robe patterned with painterly blossoms and leaves in pinks, greens, and whites, edged by lilac and pearl tones. It gathers in soft folds, catching the light with a satin sheen. Her arms fold gently across her lap. Behind her, a misty cream background shifts into mauve and lavender, where her silhouette becomes a large, diffuse shadow. Her lacquer-red lips and nails, the sharp fringe, and the silk wrap echo Art Deco modernity, while Wong’s averted gaze resists easy consumption as she is presented not as an “exotic” type, but as a thinking, autonomous star. In her autobiography In Pursuit of Perfection (1958), Wilding recalled photographing Anna May Wong at her studio at 22 Old Bond Street. “Anna May Wong ... had the first long red fingernails I had ever seen. When I lifted her hands to 'drape' them', they were so fragile that one felt one was holding the most delicate snowdrops. She was the softest and gentlest creature one can imagine.” Among Wilding's team, she employed artist Beatrice Johnson to paint backdrops and produce painted color versions of portraits to blend the boundary between camera image and painted art.
December 27, 2025 at 5:49 PM
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“白領結學生像 (Portrait of a Student with a White Bow)” by 孫多慈 Sun Duoci (Chinese) - Oil on canvas / 1958 - Taipei Fine Arts Museum (Taiwan) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #art #artText #artwork #SunDuoci #孫多慈 #TFAM #ChineseArt #ChineseArtist #TaipeiFineArtsMuseum #WomenPaintingWomen
A young East Asian woman sits turned slightly left in a large woven chair, her body angled away while her face remains quietly present. Her light-to-medium skin is warmed with soft blush across the cheeks as dark brows and almond-shaped eyes look to our left with a composed, thoughtful focus. Shoulder-length dark hair falls in loose waves and is gathered back with small blue ribbons. She wears a pale green jacket with a broad collar. At her neck a crisp white bow with lace-like edges catches the light while beneath it, a narrow red tie drops like a single vertical stroke. Her forearms fold across her lap, hands tucked into pockets out of view, giving her posture a self-possessed restraint. The paint is laid in broad, confident strokes of greens, browns, and reds so the chair’s texture and the background’s mottled green haze feel “suggested” rather than fully described, keeping attention on her calm steadiness. Painted in 1958, the portrait is both a likeness and a statement about becoming. The “student” signaled by the immaculate white bow, the red accent like resolve held close, and the folded arms as a boundary she controls. This balance of realism and atmosphere aligns with Sun Duoci’s (孫多慈) training in rigorous drawing. In the early 1930s, Sun Duoci (孫多慈) studied at National Central University in Nanjing under Xu Beihong (徐悲鴻), who is widely described as her mentor and an important force behind her rigorous academic drawing. Most accounts claim their closeness became romantic, especially around 1938, amid Xu’s separation from Jiang Biwei (蔣碧微), but “affair” details are contested. By the 1940s, Sun’s life clearly diverges as she marries Republic of China (KMT) politician Xu Shaodi (許紹棣) and eventually moved to Taiwan. She described her guiding principle as honoring nature “to take creation as the teacher” and across her career she sought ways to let Western structure and light deepen Chinese ink traditions (“bringing the West to moisten the Chinese”).
December 27, 2025 at 3:37 AM
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“Anna May Moaney” by Ruth Starr Rose (American) - Oil on Masonite / 1930 - Water’s Edge Museum (Oxford, Maryland) #WomenInArt #RuthStarrRose #WatersEdgeMuseum #BlackPortraiture #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #art #artText #BlueskyArt #AmericanArtist #AmericanArt #1930sArt #WomenPaintingWomen
Painted in 1930, this portrait belongs to a remarkable group of paintings in which American artist Ruth Starr Rose recorded the daily lives of Black families on Maryland’s Eastern Shore at a time when mainstream imagery often relied on caricature. The sitter, Anna May Moaney, worked as a domestic worker and Rose depicts her with the visual language typically reserved for “privileged” subjects including careful modeling, a poised posture, and psychological depth that suggests self-possession. Anna May is presented as a young Black woman with almost glowing brown skin shown from the chest up, turned slightly to our left. Her short hair is styled in glossy finger-waves, with a curl resting on her forehead and a bright red bow tucked behind her left ear. Wide, amber-brown almond eyes look off to our left giving her expression an alertness as well as calm authority. Soft light models her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose. Rose uses warm tans and olive shadows rather than harsh contrast, so her face seems to glow from within. She wears a patterned dress in muted blues and rose tones with ruffled white sleeves and neckline, edged in pale yellow. Behind her, a pale grid of a window and a wash of rust-red wall are loosely brushed, keeping attention on Anna May’s steady presence. The Water’s Edge Museum notes her “strong outward gaze,” and links her self-assurance to Gertrude Stein’s character Melanctha Herbert. Later nicknamed “the Black Mona Lisa,” Moaney’s look holds the room as not decorative nor compliant, but sovereign. Rose lived fewer than twenty miles from Oxford and returned again and again to families in Copperville and Unionville, building an archive of work, worship, and family life. Today, the portrait helps ask us to widen the story of who “founded” or “built” America and recognize those whose labor and lineage shaped the nation, even when the record often tried to forget them.
December 26, 2025 at 10:08 PM