"As long as I live I will have control over my being. I have made a solemn vow never to send my drawings because people have cheated me. In particular, just today I found... that, having done a drawing of souls in Purgatory for the Bishop of St. Gata, he, in order to spend less, commissioned another painter to do the painting using my work. If I were a man, I can't imagine it would have turned out this way. My illustrious lordship, i'll show you what a woman can do. They [clients] come to a woman with this kind of talent, that is, to vary the subjects in my painting; never has anyone found in my pictures any repetition of invention, not even of one hand. You will find the spirit of Caesar in this soul of a woman." (Artemisia Gentileschi), Being a woman painter, or a female artist in general, during the sixteen hundreds through the early eighteen hundreds was immensely more arduous than what any male painter during those times would have been forced to go through. It was not enough for a woman to be just good, they had to be extraordinary, and even that would maybe bring them up to closely equal to a male artist, but they could never attain superiority over a man in that position. Thomas Gainsborough contrasts Artemisia Gentileschi's work by his content, form and sheer status as a white European man. His works depict woman of all classes but presents them all with the same sensuality as each other. Gentileschi uses her work to show woman that have been wronged and gives them a power over something in her pieces. Here are the different representations of woman that these two display through their painting.
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Mrs Siddons
"Mrs Siddons (1755–1831) was the greatest tragic actress of her time, remaining at the top of her profession for 30 years. Gainsborough painted her in the winter of 1784–5, during her third London season."
"Most of Mrs Siddons’s earlier portraits depict her in character, but Gainsborough portrayed her off-stage and in fashionable contemporary dress. She wears a black beaver hat trimmed with ribbon and ostrich feathers, and a blue striped ‘wrapping-gown’, yellow mantle and fox-fur muff. Gainsborough apparently found some difficulty in capturing Mrs Siddons’s distinctive features, and is said to have exclaimed: ‘Confound the nose, there’s no end to it!’"
"At the time Gainsborough painted her, Mrs Siddons was playing the greatest of all her roles – Lady Macbeth. Something of the power and passion of that part can be felt in the portrait, considered by some as the artist’s masterpiece."
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Ann Ford
"Gainsborough was an ambitious and promising young artist when he moved to the fashionable spa city of Bath in western England in 1759 at the suggestion of his friend Philip Thicknesse. There Gainsborough achieved almost overnight success. This portrait of Thicknesse’s future wife, Ann Ford, contributed significantly to his reputation. Gainsborough had made few full-length portraits before that time, but the painting of Miss Ford, a well-known beauty and amateur musician, was his first in Bath. With dashing effect, he combined the current taste for informality and animated paint handling with the grandeur of works by Anthony van Dyck, whose portraits were highly regarded in England."
"In interpreting van Dyckian “grand manner” portraiture with brilliant and distinctive brushwork, and by depicting his subject with vivacity, Gainsborough created a memorable image that proved profoundly influential for British portraitists in the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth."
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