Boom time for female Old Masters
June 17 2022
Picture: FT/Weiss Gallery
Here's a good article by Breeze Barrington in the FT on the rise in values for works by female Old Masters. In part, this is due to a very belated realisation by institutions that they need to look again at the representation of female artists in their male-dominated collections. But it also represents a shift in taste among collectors. Within the article, there's news of an interesting discovery at the Weiss Gallery, of a sketch of Charles Beale by Mary Beale (above).
It's been bugging me for a while, incidentally, the awkwardness of the term 'female Old Master'. Can we do better? Old Mistress obviously doesn't work. But would de-gendering the collective noun for painters before 1800 give us a chance to come up with a more appealing name anyway, one without the perjorative 'old'? I am, at this moment, stumped. 'Classic art' hasn't really taken off. And 'female classical artists' conjures up violins. Can you think of something? Let me know.
Update - a reader writes:
It says a lot about the industry that it uses ‘old masters’ for any work produced before c.1800 in the first place, and ‘master/mastery’ of course implies maleness. I don’t really have an offering for an alternative term, but I can usually get away with ‘renaissance women artists’ (although I also usually only write about things pre-1700), but that has its own problems, especially given the different meanings of the word ‘renaissance’. But I do think that if we focused on eras or styles that might help. If you call Artemisia an ‘old master’ you need to specify her gender, but if you call her a baroque or 17th century painter you don’t.
It does make it easier if we are more period-specific, like Renaissance or Baroque. And these are more engaging terms too, than just 'old'. We probably do still need a catch all term though. Of course, the French just have 'tableaux anciens', and the Italians 'dipinti antici'. Which at least is non-gender specific.
