Congratulations to Anneke Newman of Australia for correctly identifying the 35 painters whose works appeared in the most recent contest on Underpaintings. Solving this task required a lot of research, and Annke deserves the prizes she earned.
This was a tough contest, not just for the contestants, but for me as well. I knew what my theme would be when I began preparing this quiz, namely, portraits of women artists by women artists (including self-portraits), but finding images was sadly not as easy as it should have been. There were many female artists whom I wished to include, like Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau, Marianne Stokes, Henrietta Rae, Annie Louise Swynnerton, and Anna Lea Merritt, but I was unable to find works of theirs that fit my motif.
This first stumbling block became a boon, however, because it forced me to discover many talented artists I had previously not known. Soon, though, I encountered a second, two-fold obstacle; a dearth of biographical information on many of these female artists, and what was available, was often in a language I could not interpret. This led to my first mistake- a portrait of Hanna Pauli which I thought was a self-portrait, but turned out to be a painting by her husband, Georg Pauli (I replaced this image when I discovered my error). My second mistake, I did not discover until I was preparing this post: image #19 is of Canadian artist Helen Galloway McNicoll, but it is not a self-portrait- it was painted by artist Robert Harris. Unfortunately, the misconception on this fact is one I encountered on many, many online sites (because of this, I accepted McNicoll as the correct answer). Lastly, it's quite possible that there is another mistake in my solution to this test, and that is with image #34, the self-portrait by Hungarian painter Paczka Ferencné, the identification of which seemed to give contestants the most difficulty. I have also found her listed as Ferencné Paczka, and as Kornélia Wagner, which may have been her maiden name (it seems her husband's name was Paczka Ferenc and I am not sure if, culturally, this affects her name). I hope to find the definitive answer soon.
For the contest, I concentrated mainly on artists who were working during the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, because this is the period from which many of my favorite painters come. If ever I complained that the male artists from that time have been ignored by art historians, I have found that female artists from that same era were even more so disregarded. I hope that in the future that this slight of skilled artists, whether male or female, will be corrected.
To see more work by female artists from the late nineteenth century, visit the site Women's Art at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893. It is an excellent overview of the female artists from that period, and was of great inspiration for my contest.
Thank you to everyone who participated in this contest. I look forward to the next one, when we top 1000 followers!
Anna Bilínska-Bohdanowicz, Self-Portrait with Apron and Brushes, 1887
Rosina Emmet Sherwood, Portrait of Cecilia Beaux, 1892
Gretchen Woodman Rogers, Woman in Fur Hat (self-portrait), ca. 1915
Kate Lehman, Self-Portrait, 2005
Cecilia Beaux, Self-Portrait, 1885
Elin Danielson-Gambogi, Self-Portrait, 1900
Juliette Aristedes, Self-Portrait
Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Self-Portrait, 1790
Ellen Day Hale, Self-Portrait, 1885
Lydia Field Emmet, Self-Portrait, 1912
Elizabeth Nourse, Self-Portrait, 1892
Alice Pike Barney, Self-Portrait
Alexandra Tyng, Self-Portrait
Anna Elizabeth Klumpke, Portrait of Rosa Bonheur (study), 1898
Emily Maria Eardley Childers, Self-Portrait, 1889
Bertha Wegmann, Portrait of Jeanna Bauck, 1881
Louise-Catherine Breslau, Self-Portrait, 1904
Käthe Kollwitz, Self-Portrait, 1898
Robert Harris, Portrait of Helen Galloway McNicoll, 1910
Amy Kann, Portrait of Rachel Constantine, Philadelphia Painter
Cecilia Beaux, Self-Portrait, 1925
Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun, Self-Portrait, 1790
Hildegard Thorell, Painting of Fanny Brate, 1918
Lilla Cabot Perry, Self-Portrait, ca. 1889-1896
Alyssa Monks, Chrome (Self-Portrait), 2006
Bertha Wegmann, Portrait of Swedish Painter Jeanna Bauck, 1887
Patricia Watwood, Creation (Self-Portrait), 2006
Angelica Kauffman, Self-Portrait, 1784
Mary Cassatt, Self-Portrait, 1880
Dame Laura Knight, Self-Portrait, 1913
Rose-Adélaïde Ducreux, Self-Portrait with a Harp, 1791
Marie Bashkirtseff, Self-Portrait with a Palette, ca. 1883
Lea Colie Wight, Self-Portrait, 2008
Paczka Ferencné, Self-Portrait
Hanna Hirsch-Pauli, Portrait of Artist Venny Soldan-Brofeldt, ca. 1887
