WEEKLY Dose of Art

For a long time, whenever an incredibly beautiful painting showed up, art experts looked at it and thought, “No chance a woman made this.”

So what did they do? They gave credit to men instead.

So how did this keep happening?

Because for a long time, the rules were built against women from the start.

For centuries, women weren’t allowed into art school.

And the biggest thing students learned there was life drawing. That meant studying real human bodies and sketching them. Back then, people thought this was the key to becoming a “serious” artist.

So if a painting showed the human body really well, people made a dumb assumption:

“A woman couldn’t have done that.”

Then they gave the credit to whoever was nearby:

• A brother.

• A husband.

• A father.

• Some famous guy in the same city.
  

Artist spotlight of the week

Five women whose work ended up under a man's name

Five women whose work ended up under a man’s name:

She lived in Brussels in the 1600s, when women were banned from art school. She still learned to paint and became brilliant at it.

But Michaelina had already answered them. She painted herself into the canvas, standing on the right side and staring straight at the viewer. Like she was saying, I made this. Remember me.

People still ignored her. In the early 1900s, a museum curator even wrote that a painting this bold could not have come from a woman.

Now, after all these years, she’s finally getting her first-ever show in the UK at the Royal Academy in London. It’s open until June 21, 2026.

She started painting as a teenager in Italy in the late 1500s.

She was respected while she was alive. But after she died, tastes changed, and her name faded.

Some of her paintings were credited to her father, Orazio. Others were given to Caravaggio simply because people found it easier to believe famous men made them.

For centuries, she was treated like a side note. 

Today, she is seen as one of the great Baroque artists.

She was a successful Dutch painter in the 1600s.

After she died, many of her paintings were sold under the name Frans Hals, a more famous male artist from the same city. His name on a painting meant it sold for far more money at auction than her name would have. So bit by bit, her work disappeared under his.

This continued for two hundred years. Then, in 1892, someone examined one of those paintings and found another signature hidden underneath. It said JL with a small star, Judith’s personal mark that she used to sign her work.

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was a German artist living in New York in the early 1900s. She made art from objects she found on the street. Long before it became normal, she was turning everyday things into art.

The most famous artwork ever made using this idea is Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, from 1917. It's just a regular porcelain urinal placed on its side with a fake signature on it.

Some serious art historians believe Baroness Elsa made it. That she submitted it to an exhibition under a fake male name, Richard Mutt, without telling Duchamp. 

Duchamp himself wrote a letter to his sister in 1917, saying one of his female friends submitted it under a male fake name, but he never said who.

She was an American painter known for portraits of children with huge, haunting eyes. Her husband, Walter, was great at selling and talking. He told everyone he painted them.

He gave interviews, explained the “creative process,” and became famous. Margaret kept painting in private while he took the credit.

So is anything actually changing?

Kinda. But slowly.

Women make up just 1% of the collection at London's National Gallery. 

And since women were ignored back then, it's that finding them now is genuinely hard. Works by women were often unsigned, less likely to be cleaned, and stored away rather than displayed. 

As art historian Van der Stighelen puts it, if a painting was never cleaned, there's little chance of ever finding a hidden signature underneath.

So the ones being found now are the lucky ones.

This Week in Art