Women artists

Every artist in this collection was, at some point, either the only woman in the room or written out of the room afterwards. Artemisia Gentileschi was the first woman in the Florentine academy and then spent three centuries in a footnote. Hilma af Klint painted abstractly before Kandinsky and asked that nobody look for twenty years. Mary Cassatt was the American Impressionist and is remembered mainly for babies. Kathe Kollwitz was the first woman in the Prussian Academy and was then removed from it.

The buying picture is different for each. Cassatt and Kollwitz made prints, so genuine originals are within reach. Af Klint and Gentileschi are museum-only and their books are recent and good. Georgia O'Keeffe and Yayoi Kusama are in copyright, so the licensed museum shops are the right source for reproductions.

The second group widens the picture. Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun was painting Marie Antoinette in the 1780s and painted copies of her own pictures, so "a version by the artist" is not the prime picture. Rosa Bonheur needed a police permit to wear trousers while she sketched; the period way to own her Horse Fair is Thomas Landseer's engraving of it. Berthe Morisot and Paula Modersohn-Becker made a few etchings and drypoints, mostly printed after their deaths, so ask when an impression was printed. Suzanne Valadon's etchings are the buyable originals of this group, most of them impressions from the 1932 album of eighteen plates. Emily Carr's own books, starting with Klee Wyck, are the cheapest way into her work, and Frida Kahlo's paintings in Mexico cannot even leave it for good: a 1984 decree bars their permanent export.