Knowing It Can Be Done: Women in the Art of the Enlightenment (1650–1800)

Abstract

This chapter examines the trajectories, constraints, and achievements of women artists across Europe and beyond during the Enlightenment (1650–1800), foregrounding their often-overlooked presence in art history and analyzes the systemic barriers that restricted women’s access to formal artistic education, professional guilds, and public recognition, while simultaneously highlighting the strategies through which many overcame these limitations—whether through family workshops, salons, court patronage, or international travel. Through detailed case studies of prominent figures such as Luisa Roldán, Rosalba Carriera, Maria Sibylla Merian, Angelica Kauffman, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, and Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, this chapter explores how women navigated patriarchal structures to claim intellectual and artistic agency. It also reflects on the symbolic tensions between Enlightenment ideals of reason and the persistent feminization of affect, domesticity, and virtue in artistic representation. The author proposes re-reading the Enlightenment canon through a gendered lens, arguing that women artists contributed significantly to creative innovation and reshaped the socio-cultural landscape by insisting on their visibility, authorship, and autonomy. Ultimately, this chapter calls for a more inclusive historiography that reclaims these women’s legacies as integral to the evolution of modern artistic and epistemological paradigms.