8 Famous Female Painters Who Left Their Mark on Art History
For a long time, art history was essentially told from a male perspective. However, women painted, exhibited, taught, and innovated throughout all eras, sometimes having to overcome obstacles that their male counterparts simply did not face.
Some are now world-famous, like Frida Kahlo or Georgia O'Keeffe. Others, like Emily Sartain, remain surprisingly little known, even though their influence far exceeds the works they left behind.
We have chosen eight female painters with very different paths. Not necessarily the eight "most important" – such a ranking would inevitably be subjective – but eight artists whose stories help us understand how women progressively carved out their place in the art world.
1. Artemisia Gentileschi: painting women differently
Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 – c. 1654) belonged to an era where becoming a professional painter was already an exceptional path for a woman.
Trained in her father Orazio Gentileschi's workshop, she was part of the Caravaggesque movement and developed a spectacular style of painting characterized by chiaroscuro, powerful compositions, and monumental figures.
But what is still striking today is the importance she gave to women.
Judith, Susanna, Cleopatra, or Lucretia are not mere decorative silhouettes. They become complex characters, capable of action, resistance, and decision.
Judith Beheading Holofernes probably remains the most striking example of this painting. Artemisia reinterprets a biblical episode treated by many artists, but imbues it with an unusual physical intensity.
Her career also testifies to genuine professional recognition. She worked in Florence, Rome, Naples, and London, and became a member of the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence.
Gradually rediscovered by art historians in the 20th century, Artemisia Gentileschi is today considered a major figure in Baroque painting.
2. Berthe Morisot: Impressionism in the feminine… but not only
To reduce Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) to a "female Impressionist" would almost be to do her a second injustice.
Because she was at the very heart of the Impressionist adventure.
In 1874, she participated in the group's first exhibition, which included Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, and Sisley. From then on, she abandoned the official Salon and participated in Impressionist exhibitions until 1886, with the exception of the 1879 one.
Her painting The Cradle, painted in 1872, has become one of her most famous works.
Morisot painted much of her immediate surroundings: women, children, gardens, domestic scenes. These subjects were sometimes considered minor by critics of the time. However, today they allow us to observe a part of 19th-century society rarely depicted from within.
Her painting is recognizable by an extremely free touch. Some parts seem almost unfinished, as if the painting retained the speed of the gesture that created it.
In 1874, Berthe Morisot married Eugène Manet, Édouard Manet's brother. Yet she continued to sign her paintings with her own name: Berthe Morisot.
A detail that seems trivial today but certainly was not at the end of the 19th century.
3. Mary Cassatt: an American at the heart of French Impressionism
Born in Pennsylvania in 1844, Mary Cassatt made an unusual decision very early on: she wanted to become a professional artist.
She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before leaving for Europe.
In Paris, she copied old masters and continued her training. In 1868, one of her works was accepted at the Paris Salon.
But her career took on another dimension when she became close to Edgar Degas and the Impressionist group.
Cassatt thus became one of the few American artists directly associated with the movement.
She is particularly known for her depictions of women and children. However, reducing her work to maternal scenes would be misleading.
Her paintings and prints also show women reading, attending shows, observing the world, or simply absorbed in their own thoughts.
She also took a deep interest in printmaking and Japanese prints, the influence of which appears in several of her compositions.
And her story intersects with that of another, much lesser-known woman today.
Her name is Emily Sartain.
4. Emily Sartain: the woman painter history almost forgot
Why do some artists remain in history books while others gradually disappear from collective memory?
Emily Sartain's (1841-1927) career precisely raises this question.
A painter, printmaker, teacher, and director of a major American art school, she moved in the same artistic environment as several personalities who became much more famous.
A childhood literally surrounded by art
Emily Sartain was born in Philadelphia in 1841.
In the Sartain family, art was a family affair.
Her father, John Sartain, was a renowned engraver. Several of her brothers also became artists. Emily thus received artistic training very early on before studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
There, she worked notably with Christian Schussele.
But like many American artists of her time, she understood that Europe was an almost essential step to deepen her training.
And it is here that her story meets that of Mary Cassatt.
Emily Sartain and Mary Cassatt: a relationship documented by their letters
The two artists met in Philadelphia around 1870.
They then shared an ambition still unusual for two young American women: to make art a true profession and to continue their training in Europe.
This relationship is not only reported in recent biographies.
The Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution today preserve a correspondence between Mary Cassatt and Emily Sartain.
The collection includes fourteen letters from Cassatt to Sartain as well as one letter from Sartain to Cassatt, approximately dated from 1872 to 1874.
These documents notably discuss the European trip they planned as well as Cassatt's artistic development in Spain and Italy.
Other Sartain family archives preserved by the Smithsonian also include letters in which Emily tells her father about her European travels with Mary Cassatt.
This documentation is particularly valuable: it allows us to go beyond biographical anecdotes and concretely reconstruct the networks that existed between American women artists of the 19th century.
From Philadelphia to Europe
Cassatt returned to Europe in 1871.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art indicates that she spent eight months in Parma in 1872. There, she studied the works of Correggio and Parmigianino and worked with Carlo Raimondi, head of engraving at the Academy of Parma.
Emily Sartain also continued her European training.
She notably studied in Paris with the French painter Évariste Vital Luminais and deepened her knowledge of engraving.
These stays were essential.
For American artists of this generation, Europe provided direct access to the collections of major museums, studios, and an artistic culture difficult to access in the United States.
A pioneer of printmaking
Emily Sartain developed an extensive printmaking practice alongside her painting.
She notably worked with mezzotint, a technique that allows for very rich tonal nuances and particularly deep blacks.
Her work was recognized at the Centennial Exhibition held in Philadelphia in 1876.
She also received the Mary Smith Prize from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1881 and then in 1883.
However, her activity did not stop at her own artistic production.
It was probably in teaching that she exerted her most lasting influence.
Training women to become true professional artists
In 1886, Emily Sartain took over the direction of the Philadelphia School of Design for Women.
She held this position for over three decades.
Under her leadership, the institution became a major institution for women's art education in the United States.
Sartain championed an idea that seems obvious today but was far from it then: women should have access to artistic training as demanding as that offered to men.
She particularly developed the study of the live model and reinforced the professional dimension of the teaching.
The stakes went far beyond painting.
At a time when professional opportunities for women remained limited, learning drawing, illustration, engraving, or applied arts could also provide economic independence.
Sartain thus contributed to evolving the school from teaching primarily focused on industrial arts to a truly ambitious artistic training.
Why is Emily Sartain much less famous than Mary Cassatt?
The comparison is fascinating.
Two women born only three years apart.
Two American artists linked to Philadelphia.
Two women who went to train in Europe.
Two professional careers in a largely male art world.
Yet, today, Mary Cassatt belongs to the pantheon of Impressionism while Emily Sartain remains unknown to the general public.
Part of the explanation undoubtedly lies in their different trajectories.
Cassatt built an immediately identifiable body of work and became part of one of the most famous movements in art history.
Sartain gradually divided her energy between creation, printmaking, teaching, administration, and advocating for women's art education.
Her legacy is therefore less easy to summarize with a few iconic paintings.
It is nonetheless important.
Emily Sartain thus reminds us of something that art history sometimes forgets: an artist's influence is not solely measured by the works displayed in museums, but also by the artists they help train and the institutions they transform.
5. Sonia Delaunay: when color takes over everything
With Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), the boundary between painting, fashion, textile, and design deliberately blurs.
Born in the Russian Empire and settled in Paris, she and Robert Delaunay developed a research based on the interactions between colors.
Circles, disks, rhythms, and colorful contrasts give some compositions an almost musical sensation.
But Sonia Delaunay refused to limit this research to the canvas.
She transposed her principles into clothing, fabrics, objects, decor, and publishing.
This ability to take art beyond the painting seems surprisingly contemporary today.
Her work above all shows that artistic research can become a true visual language, capable of existing on radically different media.
6. Georgia O'Keeffe: looking differently
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) is one of the great figures of American modernism.
She decided at a very young age to become an artist and studied notably at the Art Institute of Chicago and then at the Art Students League of New York.
Her immense flowers are among the most recognizable images of 20th-century art.
By greatly enlarging natural elements, O'Keeffe forces the viewer to slow down their gaze.
Petals, bones, mountains, and New Mexico landscapes become almost abstract.
This is precisely what makes her work particularly interesting: it constantly oscillates between representation and abstraction.
We recognize what we are looking at while sometimes having the impression of observing an abstract composition made solely of lines, volumes, and colors.
7. Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco transformed into an attitude
It is impossible to easily confuse a portrait by Tamara de Lempicka with that of another painter.
Sculpted faces, geometric bodies, smooth colors, confident gazes: her aesthetic seems to condense all the sophisticated imagination of the 1920s and 1930s.
Settled in Paris after the Russian Revolution, she constructed her public persona as carefully as her painting.
Her portraits depict a modern, elegant, and cosmopolitan society.
One of her most famous images, Self-Portrait in a Green Bugatti, has become emblematic of this independent woman whom she herself stages.
Nearly a century later, her aesthetic continues to influence fashion photography, advertising, and interior design.
Few artists have managed to make an era so immediately recognizable.
8. Frida Kahlo: self-portrait as territory
Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) is probably the most immediately identifiable female painter today.
However, behind the popular icon lies a relatively focused and deeply personal body of work.
Kahlo truly began painting in 1925 during her convalescence after a serious bus accident.
She then regularly used her own face as artistic material.
Her self-portraits do not simply seek resemblance. They stage the body, pain, identity, Mexican culture, romantic relationships, and self-construction.
Her universe has often been associated with Surrealism. Kahlo herself, however, rejected this overly simplistic interpretation of her work: she considered herself to be painting her own reality rather than her dreams.
This distinction is essential.
In Frida Kahlo's work, the strangeness of the images does not necessarily come from an imaginary world: it arises from the transformation of an intimate experience into pictorial language.
This is probably one of the reasons why her work continues to touch a considerable audience several decades after her death.
Eight artists, eight ways of conquering space
Artemisia Gentileschi, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Emily Sartain, Sonia Delaunay, Georgia O'Keeffe, Tamara de Lempicka, and Frida Kahlo do not belong to the same era or the same movement.
And that is precisely what makes their rapprochement interesting.
One established herself in Baroque Italy. Another participated in the birth of Impressionism. Some explored color or self-portraiture, while Emily Sartain dedicated a considerable part of her career to enabling other women to access genuine artistic training.
Their history primarily shows why we should be wary of a vision of art history reduced to a few great names.
Alongside iconic artists, there are personalities whose role was considerable but whose memory has gradually faded.
Emily Sartain is a remarkable example of this.
Rediscovering these trajectories is therefore not simply about adding a few women to an already written art history.
It sometimes allows us to tell this story differently.
Sources and further reading
For the writing of this article, we notably consulted the resources and archives of the Smithsonian Institution – Archives of American Art dedicated to the Sartain family and the Mary Cassatt–Emily Sartain correspondence; the biography of Mary Cassatt published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the resources of the Smithsonian American Art Museum dedicated to Mary Cassatt; the resources of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum; as well as the resources of the French Ministry of Culture dedicated to Berthe Morisot.
The Archives of American Art notably hold a set of fifteen letters from the Cassatt–Sartain correspondence as well as Sartain family archives including documents related to Emily Sartain's European travels.