OLD MASTER? WHAT ABOUT MISTRESSES?

The Mirror And The Palette Jennifer Higgie W&N £20 ★★★★★

Picture the face of an old master or modern painter. What springs to mind? Rembrandt’s jowls? Van Gogh’s eyes? Chances are that the face isn’t female, claims art historian Jennifer Higgie. Frida Kahlo (right) is perhaps the only woman painter whose features have lodged in the public consciousness. But with this new book, a fascinating survey of women’s selfportraits from the Renaissance to the 20th Century, Higgie aims to redress the balance.

Over the years, Higgie claims, the female artist has been cast as ‘a seductress, a changeling, a visionary, a man-hater, a freak; she’s never considered normal’. Countering those salacious labels, she instead presents various figures – British, American, European – as persuasive talents dedicated to, and suffering for, their art.

In addition to Kahlo, they include Artemisia Gentileschi, the 17th Century painter who prevailed over the brutality of men to paint herself tousle-haired, dynamically wielding her brush; and Sofonisba Anguissola, another

Italian, who created a disorientating meta-self-portrait in 1559 when she painted her teacher finishing a portrait of her.

And then there was Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, a favourite of Marie Antoinette, who caused a scandal by painting herself smiling (well, she had just escaped the guillotine).

Potted biographies of the artists are combined with insights into how their self-portraits signal these narratives. There are some extraordinary details. During the Second World War, the ageing Finnish modernist Helene Schjerfbeck checked in to a grand hotel near Stockholm and began obsessively painting herself. ‘She depicts herself as an apparition,’ Higgie writes. ‘These are frightening paintings; she already looks dead.’

It is perhaps Leonora Carrington, the English debutante turned Surrealist, who best captures the lively spirit of this book. Her dreamlike 1938 self-portrait included a hovering rocking horse and a lactating hyena. ‘I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse,’ Carrington once recalled. ‘I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.’