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Then there were dozens of painters who, through changes of fashion, dispersal of their work or simply the fact of being women, fell into the oubliette. Nothing is more fragile than an artist's reputation. Names like Anne Vallayer-Coster, Sofonisba Anguissola, Judith Leyster or Louise Moillon are scarcely commonplace. Yet the quality of their work is incontestable: Vallayer-Coster's The White Soup Bowl (1771), with its beautifully rendered planes and rotundities of steaming tureen and crinkled napkin, comes close to Chardin in reverent and cadenced description of commonplace things. To see such works resurrected in this show—however few the samples—gives a shock of belated recognition: How can such talent have nearly disappeared?
Harris and Nochlin, in fascinating detail, show exactly how it could—and did: the social conditions that militated against women's becoming "fine" artists during the Renaissance, the restrictions on literacy, training, access to professional company and guilds, the peculiar moral shibboleths, the stereotype of the cultured woman as accomplished dabbler, engaged in what George Eliot called "small tinkling and smearing." "Let men busy themselves with all that has to do with great art," trumpeted one French critic in 1860. "Let women occupy themselves with those types of art that they have always preferred, such as pastels, portraits and the painting of flowers..."
The corollary was the myth of feminine sensibility. This, like anatomy, was declared to be destiny. Mary Cassatt's" Young Woman in Black (1883) is the kind of painting that used to be cited, with 20/20 hindsight, as the product of an "essentially feminine" sensibility, a painting as full of style and chic as an egg is of albumin. But is the kind of sensibility in its design—the springy black silhouette of blouse and tunic relieved by one dash of white, the brisk notation of the face smeared and flecked by the black lace veil, the emphatic circumflex of the painted fan behind the girl's head—essentially different from that of Degas, Cassatt's mentor? Stylishness does not go by gender; perhaps it never did. Cecilia Beaux's Sita and Sarita (1921) looks "feminine" when you know that it is the work of a once very popular American female portraitist, a gifted conservative with a relaxed, unemphatic and slightly languid style—but not until then. And with more abstract art, division by gender becomes meaningless. What sex is Alice Trumbull Mason's painting L'Hasard (1948)? One might answer: platonic.