Michael

Japanese artist Kuroda Seiki (黒田清輝) painted this work in 1893 after nearly a decade studying painting in France, where he absorbed Impressionist approaches to light and color. Returning home, he traveled to Kyoto (京都), where traditional neighborhoods, geisha culture, and local customs felt newly vivid after years abroad. These impressions inspired works such as “Maiko” which depicts a young apprentice geisha sits beside an open window overlooking the softly flowing Kamo River (鴨川) in Kyoto. She wears a richly patterned kimono layered with subtle tones that catch warm backlight entering from behind her. Her elaborate hairstyle, decorated with ornaments typical of a maiko, is outlined by the glow of daylight. The sitter is turned slightly toward another unseen figure, suggesting quiet conversation rather than a posed portrait. The textures of silk, hair, and wooden interior surfaces are rendered with careful observation. Outside the window, the river reflects the afternoon light in shimmering bands, giving the scene a calm rhythm. The figure’s composed posture and attentive expression suggest a moment of listening or reflection, capturing both the elegance and discipline associated with maiko training. The painting blends Western oil techniques of naturalistic light, atmospheric perspective, and subtle tonal modeling with distinctly Japanese subject matter. At the time, Japan was rapidly modernizing during the Meiji era, and Kuroda became a key figure introducing yōga, Western-style painting, into the Japanese art world. The maiko represents a living tradition of young women trained in classical dance, music, etiquette, and conversation within Kyoto’s old entertainment districts. Kuroda, saw these traditions through the eyes of someone who had spent years immersed in Western culture. The composition reflects this dual perspective as the river outside the window becomes a quiet metaphor: flowing steadily through the ancient city while the world around it changes.

“舞妓 (Maiko / Apprentice Geisha)” by 黒田清輝 / Kuroda Seiki (Japanese) – Oil on canvas / 1893 – Tokyo National Museum (Japan) #WomenInArt #KurodaSeiki #黒田清輝 #Kuroda #SeikiKuroda #洋画 #TokyoNationalMuseum #JapaneseArt #BlueskyArt #1890s #Maiko #舞妓 #東京国立博物館 #art #artText #artwork #東博 #JapaneseArtist #鴨川

Painted around 1880 and decades after An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger in Ireland which lasted from 1845 to at least 1852 and was previously called the Great Famine), the work sits in Irish artist Thomas Alfred Jones’s “Irish Colleen” mode depicting an idealized image of rural Irish girlhood that blends endurance with visual lyricism. The bare feet, gathered fuel/food, and an exposed trail hint at labor and scarcity, yet the girls’ composed expressions and almost theatrical color accents (reds and tartans) steer the painting toward reassurance rather than reportage. Knighted in 1880 after starting as an abandoned child raised in Dublin, Jones depicts three young girls who dominate the foreground of a windswept mountain pass, seen as if we’re standing on higher ground. All three are barefoot on a stony path. Their skin appears light, their cheeks subtly warmed by low light. Each wears layered, work-worn clothing: long skirts, aprons, and heavy shawls pulled tight against the breeze. On the left, one girl’s vivid red skirt catches our eye. She carries a basket that is heavy with provisions gathered for the way home. In the center, a red-haired girl’s plaid shawl frames her face and shoulders with a pack slung across her back, shifting her posture forward with effort. On the right, the youngest clutches her apron’s gathered fold with one hand and grips her white shawl with the other, bracing against wind gusts. Behind them, Connemara opens into rugged, barren land washed in summer twilight that softens the hard terrain while the wind animates every hem, fringe, and fold. This might be a late-Victorian attempt to craft a dignified, marketable icon of “the West,” even as Connemara was widely associated with poverty and famine legacy. Wind becomes a quiet protagonist as it presses the girls together, turns their shawls into protective architecture, and makes care and kinship feel like the painting’s true subject showing three lives moving forward, burdened but unbroken.

“Connemara Girls” by Sir Thomas Alfred Jones (Irish) - Oil on canvas / c. 1880 - Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, Quinnipiac University (Hamden, Connecticut) #WomenInArt #ThomasAlfredJones #IrelandsGreatHungerMuseum #IrishArt #GenrePainting #1880s #artText #art #BlueskyArt #IrishArtist #TheGreatHunger

Good question about the title … it’s from the museum (in Spain). I wonder if it should be Italian from the artist. 🧐

Agostino Brunias, born in Rome around 1730, spent much of his career in the British Caribbean (especially Dominica) after traveling there in the 1760s. His paintings frequently depict the complex societies of the Lesser Antilles, where African, Caribbean, and European cultures intersected. His canvases depicted daily activities such as washing clothes, trading in markets, or walking through town. He often highlighted the clothing and social identities of free women of color within colonial society. While Brunias’s paintings can provide visual records of Caribbean fashion and community life, they also present an idealized vision of colonial harmony that softens the realities of plantation slavery and colonial hierarchy. The painting’s calm tone reflects both careful observation and the expectations of European collectors. Two Caribbean women walk together along a path after leaving a market, their bodies angled slightly toward one another as if in relaxed conversation. Each balances bundles and baskets likely filled with produce or textiles and carried with practiced ease. Their clothing is vivid and layered with long skirts with aprons, fitted bodices, and colorful headwraps tied high. One woman turns her head toward the other as she gestures gently with her hand, suggesting companionship and familiarity. The tropical landscape is warm earth tones and soft vegetation that frame the figures rather than dominate the scene. The women’s clothing likely carries social meaning within the colonial Caribbean context. Free women of African descent frequently participated in local markets as vendors, traders, and small-scale entrepreneurs, and their dress became an important marker of identity and status. The brightly colored skirts, fitted bodices, jewelry, and carefully tied headwraps seen correspond to historical descriptions of Caribbean fashion among these women, who used clothing both to express cultural identity and to signal respectability or prosperity.

“Dos mujeres antillanas viniendo del mercado” (Two Caribbean Women Returning from the Market) by Agostino Brunias (Italian) – Oil on canvas / c. 1770–1780 – Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga (Málaga, Spain) #WomenInArt #AgostinoBrunias #Brunias #MuseoCarmenThyssen #CaribbeanArt #ColonialArt #art #artText

Thanks so much for re-sharing this up-and-coming (and very talented) artist's work. The need for supporting each other feels as important as ever these days. 😍

Painted in 1856 and inscribed “Paris,” this small canvas holds a vivid memory of French artist Camille Pissarro’s birthplace (St. Thomas island in the Caribbean Sea) filtered through distance and reflection. Rather than turning two women into scenery, the composition centers their mutual attention as a pause, a shared space, and an ordinary coordination of bodies carrying weight and time. Two dark-skinned women pause in conversation on a sunlit dirt path beside the sea. We look slightly down at them from a close, human distance. The woman facing us balances a flat tray piled with white cloth on her head, steadying it with one hand. Her long, off-white dress gathers at the hips, still falling to the ankles. A patterned deep green with red and brown headscarf wraps her hair and knots near one ear. The second woman stands with her back to us in an aquamarine dress, a garnet-red scarf tied around her head. A brown basket hangs from her arm. Low shrubs and grasses edge the path, while the shoreline curves inward like a crescent. Farther back, tiny strokes suggest other figures working or wading at the water’s edge. A rust-brown hill meets a pale, milky sky. The tray of linens and the basket hint at daily labor without reducing the women to it. Dignity lives in the upright stance, the steadying hand, and the unhurried exchange. The open shore behind them can represent freedom and openness, but it also quietly evokes a Caribbean shaped by trade, colonial history, and work that kept households and economies running ... often on women’s backs. Long before the broken brushwork of Impressionism, Pissarro was already practicing a kind of attentiveness that respected lived experience, held in light. The young artist relocated to Paris in late 1855 to pursue art seriously, after years split between St. Thomas and an extended spell working as an artist in Venezuela. In 1856, he had started private classes at the École des Beaux-Arts on his way to become a professional painter.

“Deux Femmes Causant au Bord de la Mer, Saint-Thomas” (Two Women Chatting by the Sea, St. Thomas) by Camille Pissarro (French) - Oil on canvas / 1856 - National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC) #WomenInArt #CamillePissarro #Pissarro #NationalGalleryofArt #NGA #artText #art #arte #1850s #CaribbeanArt

I love that vibe in this painting 😍

Two young women with light skin sit close together on a broad gray rock at the edge of a still pond. They’re framed by dense green foliage of large leaves, tangled stems, and thin branches that arc down like a soft curtain. The woman on the left has long brown hair gathered back with small gold accents. She wears a pale, off-shoulder dress that pools in luminous folds over the stone, and a small hoop earring catches the light. Her body turns toward her companion, chin lifted, as if mid-sentence or listening intently. The woman on the right has dark, curly hair held by a band. She wears a rose-pink sleeveless bodice and a red patterned skirt, cinched with a dark belt, plus a blue-green necklace. She leans in with an open, attentive posture, one arm relaxed on a knee, her gaze steady on the other woman’s face. Behind them, a misty landscape opens to show a tall waterfall that drops into a gorge, with faint buildings far in the distance, softened by haze. Italian artist Gustavo Mancinelli stages intimacy as the subject: not spectacle, not courtship, but the quiet gravity of women speaking to one another where the world feels safely far away. The waterfall and drifting mist add a sense of the sublime (and nature’s scale), yet the emotional center stays small and human via a shared pause, a held gaze, and the comfort of being heard. In 1873, Mancinelli was in the phase of his career where he was based in Naples and actively participating in the city’s main exhibition circuit, especially the Società Promotrice di Belle Arti (Naples). This scene echoes 19th-century genre painting’s interest in everyday narratives, while subtly shifting power toward women’s interior lives with conversation as agency and companionship as refuge. The distant architecture reads almost like “society” pushed to the horizon, while the foreground offers a private clearing where attention, trust, and selfhood can unfold in real time.

"Women Talking" by Gustavo Mancinelli (Italian) - Oil on canvas / 1873 - Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest (Hungary) #WomenInArt #GustavoMancinelli #Mancinelli #MuseumofFineArtsBudapest #SzépművészetiMúzeum #artText #art #BlueskyArt #PortraitofWomen #MuseumOfFineArts #ItalianArt #ItalianArtist #MFAB

French artist François Boucher made the pastoral his signature language, and by the mid-1700s, he was in high demand for decorative paintings that blended sensual surfaces (silk, skin, flowers) with storytelling. Painted in 1750, this scene is less “country life” than a Rococo fantasy of feeling, where tenderness, leisure, and desire can unfold safely in a cultivated nature. A dove (a classic messenger of love and fidelity) turns private emotion into action as affection becomes a letter, sealed and sent. Two young women sit close together on a mossy bank in a shaded woodland clearing. Both have fair, peach-toned skin, softly rouged cheeks, and carefully styled curls. The woman on the right sits slightly higher, her posture relaxed and protective as one arm circles her companion’s shoulders and she tilts her head and smiles with a tender, knowing expression. She wears a rose-pink dress with a striped skirt and airy white sleeves plus pink blossoms and small blue-yellow flowers cluster in her hair. The woman on the left leans into her, gazing up in profile. Her lavender dress shimmers like silk, warmed with gold highlights, and small blue flowers pin back her brown curls. Their bare feet peek from beneath their hems, emphasizing an intimate, unguarded moment rather than formal display. Between them rests a white dove with a blue ribbon tied at its neck. A pale envelope is held in the right woman’s hand, as if the message is about to be entrusted to/from the bird. Around them, a small pastoral “stage” includes 5 sheep and an alert black-and-white hound. A basket of flowers spills color at the lower edge. Behind, a stone structure rises, topped by a reclining lion sculpture. Tall trees arc overhead, and the distant hills dissolve into blue haze beneath a softly clouded sky. Whether innocence, desire, or the thrilling act of sending a secret, these women’s closeness feels like mutual confiding and encouraging so friendship is a shelter and catalyst.

“The Love Letter” by François Boucher (French) - Oil on canvas / 1750 - National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC) #WomenInArt #FrancoisBoucher #FrançoisBoucher #Boucher #NationalGalleryofArt #NGA #Rococo #FrenchArt #PastoralArt #art #artText #arte #BlueskyArt #LoveLetter #1750s #LoveArt #FrenchArtist

A close-up portrait shows a young Black woman with deep brown skin held in a full-body embrace. Her eyes are softly closed, her lips gently upturned, and her face looks calm, relieved, and safe. A white headband with bold black spots is tied into an oversized bow at the top of her head and her hair is pulled back so her brow, cheekbones, and an ear are visible. Her hands rest across the embrace holding on to the person supporting her. The second figure with her back to us hugs the woman back. She wears a soft hoodie painted in sweeping cool blues, pinks, and yellow and has her dark blond hair in a bun. Their bodies press together closely, creating a sense of warmth and steadiness rather than a sharply defined portrait of two individuals. Behind them, layered greens and olive tones form an abstract background with visible brushwork and softened edges, keeping the scene private and intimate. The title names what the image is doing: support is physical, emotional, and built through presence. By letting the second figure remain partly anonymous and a more sheltering shape than detailed identity, American artist Destiny Dixon (Destiny Ari’e) makes the embrace feel both personal and widely recognizable, like a moment that could belong to many kinds of relationships (partner, friend, family, or even chosen family). The closed eyes matter as they shift the focus from being seen to being cared for and from performance to rest. In her own words, Dixin describes an artistic intention rooted in “nostalgia, tranquility, and beauty,” and she connects her practice to finding serenity and building confidence through making. She also frames her work as capturing life’s meaningful moments like small refuges inside complexity. Read through that lens, “My Support System” becomes a quiet statement of power with tenderness as shelter, and care as something you can lean into without apology.

“My Support System” by Destiny Dixon / Destiny Ari’e (American) - Acrylic on canvas / 2023 - Cedar Rapids Museum of Art (Cedar Rapids, Iowa) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #DestinyDixon #DestinyArie #artText #CedarRapidsMuseumOfArt #CRMA #ContemporaryArt #BlackArt #BlackArtist

I agree. It took a bit to find out more about the art and artist, but I really like it. Feels old-timey, but is really recent with a lot of thoughtfulness into what is depicted and why. 😍

Two Chinese women float against a warm, golden background, as if suspended in a ceremonial dream. At left, Empress Liu is shown with an ivory-toned, stylized face and her black hair is gathered into a smooth, rounded style and crowned by an oversized pink peony bloom. She wears layered deep red robes with soft green sleeves and her hands tucked in a composed, inward pose. At right, Empress Dou turns slightly toward her, her expression calm and distant. Her hair rises into a tall, dark arrangement topped with a rich burgundy flower as a long pale ribbon trails in the air. She wears a patterned golden top and a darker skirt, adorned with clusters of blossoms that spill into the space between them. Green-blue ribbons loop and curl across the scene like wind-blown silk banners. Below and between the women, a golden phoenix spreads its wing in sweeping arcs of feathered lines, while a white crane glides low at the edge. Both birds are surrounded by scattered petals and dense bouquets of red, pink, yellow, and white flowers. Behind the painting's beauty is a story about power, vulnerability, and historical disappearance. In Chinese artist Xiang Li’s (李湘) telling, Empress Liu and Empress Dou (both connected to Emperor Ruizong) were accused of witchcraft and killed in 693 wither their bodies hidden and never recovered. The violence is echoed by the painting’s sense of weightless drifting. The phoenix (dynastic harmony) and the crane (longevity & transcendence) become more than decorative symbols. They are a wish for restoration, dignity, and endurance beyond the court’s intrigues. The peony (wealth, honor, and feminine prestige) crowns Liu like a fragile mandate. Li frames them not as footnotes, but as central actors: “Each empress I paint carries a story of resilience, wisdom, and strength.” The floral abundance is a memorial insistence that even when names are contested, erased, or buried, their presence can still be made visible, luminous, and impossible to overlook.

"Chinese Empress Liu and Empress Dou, Tang Dynasty" by 李湘 Xiang Li (Chinese) - Watercolor on silk / 2015 - New England Botanic Garden (Boylston, Massachusetts) #WomenInArt #XiangLi #李湘 #NewEnglandBotanicGarden #ChineseArtist #artText #art #BlueskyArt #ChineseArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists

“Danseuses” feels less like a portrait of two specific people than an image of stage work with glamour built from repetition, endurance, and control. French artist Lucien Maillol depicts a pair of dancers simplified into strong volumes, their weight described through stance and counter-stance more than facial drama. It is both celebration and constraint as the dancers are vividly visible, yet emotionally self-contained and absorbed in their own rhythm, not ours. Two adult women occupy the foreground in a warm, brown-gold music hall or cabaret. Both have light skin and short dark hair tucked beneath wide, brick-red hats trimmed with small flowers. Their faces are softly modeled with stage makeup like rouged lips, shaded eyelids while their eyes angle downward, suggesting concentration rather than performance “to” us. Each wears long black gloves above the elbow and a deep, shimmering black dress with a plunging neckline. The skirts bloom into thick black tulle that becomes a dark cloud around their legs. Their bodies mirror one another in a synchronized step of knees bent, torsos angled, and arms extended as if holding balance and timing. Red high heels echo the hats, punctuating the movement with bright, sharp accents. The pairing matters as two bodies moving as one to depict chorus-line discipline and a way nightlife often turned women into coordinated spectacle. Yet their downcast focus complicates that because they appear absorbed in their own rhythm, poised between visibility and inwardness. That tension of being seen while staying self-possessed becomes the painting’s quiet charge. Maillol, born in Banyuls-sur-Mer in 1896, was in his early thirties when he made this work in 1928. That same year he exhibited paintings in Paris at Galerie Eugène Druet in a show explicitly listing “danseuses,” suggesting the subject belonged to his active artistic concerns rather than a single passing scene.

“Danseuses (Dancers)” by Lucien Maillol (French) - Oil on canvas / 1928 - Musée d’Art moderne de Paris (Paris, France) #WomenInArt #artText #arte #art #LucienMaillol #Maillol #MuseeDArtModerneDeParis #ModernArt #DanceArt #BlueskyArt #FrenchArtist #FrenchArt #dancer #1920s #Muséed’ArtModerneDeParis

Two women with deep brown skin move toward each other on a wide, open field of green. They are barefoot, mid-step, and caught in a shared rhythm as one body leans in as if laughing while the other turns her face in reply, their expressions warm and engaged. Each wears a sleeveless dress in layered greens of teal, mint, and darker shadowed tones that is painted with loose, energetic brushwork that lets strokes stay visible. Arms extend outward in a wide arc, as if balancing or marking the beat. Their legs cross and lift in different phases of the same motion so that as one foot hovers, the other plants, toes splayed and grounded. Beneath them, a dark oval of paint like a stage-shadow, anchors the movement without locating a specific place. The background is intentionally spare without a horizon line or architecture and just shifting greens that create atmosphere rather than scenery, so our attention stays on gesture, closeness, and the quiet joy of motion between two people. Exhibited in British-Ghanaian Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s “Under-Song for a Cipher” at the New Museum in 2017, this work sits in her ongoing project of painting figures who feel fully present, but not illustrations of a named story. That refusal of fixed biography lets Black life appear in painting without being made to “explain itself” through spectacle, trauma, or documentary proof. The dancers’ green surroundings is liberation from context (no social script, no assigned era), while the dense shadow beneath them insists on physical reality that these bodies have weight, momentum, and agency. The women seem to know about our gaze without performing for it, inviting attention while keeping their interiority intact. Yiadom-Boakye often emphasizes that her starting point is painting itself such as the problem of light, color, and form. Here, that painterly logic becomes its own kind of ethic in order to make space for tenderness, companionship, and movement as undeniable subjects

“Willow Strip” by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (British-Ghanaian) - Oil on linen / 2017 - New Museum (New York) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #LynetteYiadomBoakye #YiadomBoakye #LynetteYiadom-Boakye #NewMuseum #artText #art #ArtBluesky #arte #WomenPaintingWomen #BlackArt #BlackArtist

Painted around 1913, when Spanish artist Gonzalo Bilbao Martínez was in his mature, widely celebrated period, this painting frames flamenco as lived, private culture rather than staged entertainment. A young woman dances indoors, her body arcing into a bold curve as one arm lifts high and the other gathers her shawl at the waist. Her skin is light-to-medium under warm, artificial light. Her dark hair is dressed with bright red carnations. She wears a wide, dark Cordovan hat tipped at an angle, a short necklace, and a pale fringed shawl (mantón) that ripples across her shoulders and down her torso. Below, a tiered skirt in soft rose tones swings around her legs, edged with lighter ruffles while a white boot peeks out as she steps forward. Behind her, a seated woman accompanies on guitar, her face in shadow, wearing a red blouse and a blue skirt. The setting is humble and domestic with white crockery on a small shelf, an earthenware vessel near the floor, and a small religious image on the wall. A dark shadow to the dancer’s side possibly suggests another figure just out of view like an unseen witness to this intimate performance. The room lacks the showy décor of tourist-oriented cafés; instead, everyday objects and the close proximity between dancer and guitarist evoke a gathering you’re invited into, not a spectacle you buy a ticket for. Bilbao’s lighting does important storytelling as it “spotlights” the dancer’s face and torso, carving her movement from the gray wall, while vivid accents (carnations and violet shadows in the ruffles) heighten the sensuous energy of the moment. In early 20th-century Spain, debates about “modernity” sometimes dismissed traditions like flamenco as backward. Bilbao (Sevillian by birth and deeply attached to Andalusian life) answers by making its beauty undeniable. The result is both portrait and defense depicting a woman’s artistry, rendered as dignity, joy, and force in motion.

“Una bailaora” (A Flamenco Dancer) by Gonzalo Bilbao Martínez (Spanish) - Oil on canvas / c. 1913 - Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga (Málaga, Spain) #WomenInArt #art #artText #GonzaloBilbaoMartinez #GonzaloBilbaoMartínez #Arte #MuseoCarmenThyssenMalaga #SpanishArt #SpanishArtist #MuseoCarmenThyssenMálaga

Painted around 1770 by a yet identified artist, this image is often linked to kathak, a North Indian dance tradition associated with courtly settings, where storytelling, music, and expressive gesture are woven into intricate turns and footwork. The painting compresses that complexity into one unforgettable instant: two bodies counterbalancing each other, trust made visible through clasped hands and mirrored posture. A near-empty background intensifies the choreography so nothing competes with their partnership while a circular cartouche seems like a stage spotlighting feminine virtuosity. Two young women dance as a matched pair inside an oval frame, suspended in mid-step above a small patch of green ground. Their hands meet twice: linked overhead and again at chest level to create a continuous loop of touch that anchors the motion. Both figures tilt forward at the waist, foreheads nearly aligned, eyes narrowed in concentration as if listening for the same rhythm. Their skin is a warm brown and features are finely drawn with dark, almond-shaped eyes and arched brows. Each dancer wears a translucent veil and flowing textiles that flare outward like wings including long scarves that stream behind them, edged with pale dots, while layered garments ripple at the hips and ankles. One wears mustard-yellow leggings while the other wears deep red. Bangles, earrings, and anklets adds bright points along wrists and feet. Below, a narrow band suggests a lotus pond, and small blossoms decorate the corners, keeping the focus on synchronized movement and shared presence. Whether read as performance or private joy, the work celebrates how dance can be both art and relationship involving timing, attention, and delight held together by touch, gaze, and breath.

“Two women dancing” by Unknown artist (Indian) - Opaque watercolors on paper / c. 1770 - Asian Art Museum (San Francisco, California) #WomenInArt #AsianArtMuseum #IndianArt #SouthAsianArt #artText #art #BlueskyArt #watercolor #1770s #AsianArt #dancing #RajasthaniArt #BundiPainting #Kathak #DanceArt

Painted from inside Montmartre nightlife, this scene is less “spectacle” than observation. The waltz becomes a small island of intimacy inside public performance. The National Gallery Prague’s identification connects one dancer to the entertainer Cha-U-Kao, with the famous performer Jane Avril behind, her back turned. Both are names that root the moment in French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s circle and in the field of entertainment. Two women waltz close together in the foreground, their bodies angled into a tight turning rhythm: one leading with a firm shoulder and bent arm, the other following, their torsos nearly touching. In the warm, artificial light of the Moulin Rouge cabaret interior, their faces are pale and made-up, with sharp highlights and a slightly mask-like theatricality. Their outfits feel like performance wear including dark, structured fabric, a high collar and hat, and touches of brightness that flicker as the figures move. Behind them, the space compresses into overlapping silhouettes of a crowd, rail, and stage platform so depth gives way to atmosphere. A third figure (a singer) appears just behind the dancers, turned away from us, her head and shoulders caught mid-shift as if the music is pulling the whole room into motion. Oil tempera worked on cardboard helps create a brisk, poster-like clarity with flat planes, fast contours, and a vivid sense of flicker and sound. Rather than moralizing about who belongs in places like the Moulin Rouge, Lautrec centers people often treated as background while letting gesture, closeness, and stamina tell a story. “Cha-U-Kao” (stage name) was a Paris dancer, acrobat, and “clownesse” of the 1890s. She was depicted by Lautrec many times and was associated with venues including the Moulin Rouge and the Nouveau Cirque. The dance partner may have been “Gabrielle the Dancer” and her girlfriend. Jane Avril (Jeanne Louise Beaudon) was a celebrated Moulin Rouge dancer and one of Lautrec’s frequent subjects.

“Au Moulin Rouge : Les deux valseuses (At the Moulin Rouge: Two Women Waltzing)” by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French) - Oil tempera on cardboard / 1892 - National Gallery Prague (Czechia) #WomenInArt #HenriDeToulouseLautrec #ToulouseLautrec #artText #arte #NationalGalleryPrague #NarodniGaleriePraha

Thanks so much for sharing this 💃💃😍

Two Ghanaian women dance in close connection, their bodies angled toward each other as if mid-step in a shared rhythm. One bends low with her headwrap glowing in warm light. The other leans in, upright and steady, her patterned blue blouse catching our eye. Their skin tones are deep brown against a dark, nightlike backdrop. A large green circular form behind them is textured with tiny dot-marks and creates a haloed space that feels both intimate and expansive. White highlights skim across skirts and hips, turning fabric into moving light. The women’s hands meet near the center, making the dance feel like conversation rather than performance. The scene is just two people, close enough to exchange breath, weight, and timing. The green disk functions like a moon/world for an image of cycle, season, and return while its seedlike dots suggest growth and abundance. The surrounding dark field, sprinkled with small starbursts, places their movement inside a bigger order like night sky, spirit space, or cosmic time. The dancers’ looped poses (bend/lean; reach/receive) feel almost like call-and-response or a visual metaphor for community knowledge passed body-to-body. Even the choice to show one figure turned partly away protects interiority as we witness relationship and presence without demanding full access. American artist John Biggers’ Ghana works are often discussed as shaped by his deep engagement with West Africa after his 1957 UNESCO-supported travel, and this painting carries that ethos with dance not as decoration, but as a living archive. Biggers once wrote, “I began to see art… as a responsibility to reflect the spirit and style of the Negro people,” and here that responsibility appears as joy with gravity via two women grounded, radiant, and self-possessed inside a world that seems to turn with them.

“Ghana Women Dancing” by John Biggers (American) - Oil, acrylic, and chalk on canvas / 1968 - National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington, DC) #WomenInArt #JohnBiggers #Biggers #NMAAHC #AfricanAmericanArt #art #artText #BlueskyArt #BlackArt #AfricanAmericanArtist #DanceArt

An elderly mother and a young daughter sit close together at a table, their bodies angled toward a large open bible that spans the foreground. The older woman with light skin and deeply lined face wears a red headscarf tied under her chin, small round wire-frame glasses, and a dark gray sleeveless bodice over a white blouse with gathered sleeves. Her hands rest near the book’s edge, steady and practiced, as if holding the place. The younger woman with light skin and a warm flush in the cheeks leans in from the right, her forearm on the tabletop and her gaze lowered in concentration. She wears a textured maroon vest over a cream blouse with puffed sleeves. Her brown hair is parted and smoothed back. The younger woman’s arm drapes across the older woman’s shoulders in a gentle, protective arc, creating a quiet bridge between them. The background is muted soft gray and shadowed brown so the warm reds, skin tones, and the book’s pale pages become the emotional center. Their expressions are serious and inward, suggesting attentive listening, shared study, and a calm, intimate hush. German artist Hans Thoma frames reading as both devotion and kinship. The Bible is not simply an object, but a shared space where memory, instruction, and tenderness meet. His mother’s glasses and weathered hands evoke lived experience including years of labor, routine, and belief. Meanwhile, his sister’s softened posture and lowered eyes suggest learning that is chosen, not forced. That single arm around her mother’s shoulders matters as it can read as comfort, solidarity, or a reversal of care, where the daughter offers steadiness while receiving tradition. The pared-back setting intensifies the scene’s moral quiet. There is no spectacle, just the gravity of ordinary faith and family closeness. Painted in 1866, Thoma leans into Realism’s respect for everyday life, treating domestic ritual as worthy of monumentality.

“Mutter und Schwester des Künstlers, in der Bibel lesend” (The Artist’s Mother & Sister Reading the Bible) by Hans Thoma (German) - Oil on cardboard / 1866 - Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe (Germany) #WomenInArt #HansThoma #Thoma #artText #art #StaatlicheKunsthalleKarlsruhe #KunsthalleKarlsruhe

So true! 😎 There are so many possibilities. I wonder if the sprig of purple flowers in the letter mean something, too. 🤔😍

Two Indigenous (Native American) women crouch close together on sunlit ground, turned slightly toward our right as if focused on something just beyond the frame. Both hold their hands raised at chest level, palms nearly caught mid-clap to suggest a steady rhythm rather than a single loud strike. The woman at left appears older, with a deeply lined face and a calm, intent expression. She wears a light blanket or shawl draped over her shoulders with geometric banding. The woman at right appears slightly younger, her dark hair pulled back. She wears a pale top and a warm, reddish skirt. The background is pared down to soft, sandy tones with minimal detail, so the women’s bodies, garments, and gestures carry the whole scene. Their posture is grounded, balanced, and purposeful like communal music and movement you can almost hear. American artist Joseph Henry Sharp frames the women’s clapping as both performance and prayerful attention, emphasizing rhythm as a shared form of knowledge and something made together, not possessed. As an artist closely associated with Taos, New Mexico and the early 20th-century art colony there, he repeatedly painted Indigenous life through an outsider’s eye, often blending careful observation with the era’s taste for “timeless” images of Native cultures. That tension matters here because the women’s identities are not named, yet their presence is rendered with dignity and concentration, asking us to notice skill (timing, breath, cadence) rather than spectacle. Scholarship around this work’s dating is complicated. Museum records place it around 1930, while other research links the title and signature style to Sharp’s earlier western period which suggests he may have revisited a long-held subject over time. Either way, the painting lingers on what endures: synchronized hands, shared song, and the authority of women shaping ceremony through sound and movement.

“The Chanters” by Joseph Henry Sharp (American) - Oil on canvas / c. 1930 - New Mexico Museum of Art (Santa Fe, New Mexico) #WomenInArt #JosephHenrySharp #JosephSharp #NativeAmericanArt #IndigenousWomen #PortraitofWomen #art #artText #AmericanArt #AmericanArtist #NewMexicoMuseumofArt #TaosSchool

American artist Barkley L. Hendricks treats everyday style as dignity and portraiture as recognition. By isolating two Black women, identified as Susan (left) and Toni (right), on a gray, monochrome field, he turns the smallest choices like cap brim, belt buckle, and bracelet glint into signals of agency and self-definition. Susan and Toni stand side by side against a deep, nearly solid dark background that makes their clothing and skin tones feel luminous. Susan, a dark-brown–skinned woman with a calm, steady expression, wears a pale blue short-sleeve button-up shirt with an open collar and a matching light blue cap. Her dark jeans sit high at the waist, held by a belt. Her stance is relaxed, with one hand in a pocket, and she wears bright white shoes. Toni, also dark-brown–skinned, faces forward with a direct, composed gaze. She wears a light green sleeveless top and a matching headscarf topped by a pair of round sunglasses. Her high-waisted dark jeans echo Susan’s, and she wears white shoes as well. Jewelry like rings, a bracelet, a watch, and earrings are painted with crisp precision, emphasizing texture such as metal catching light, fabric seams, and the subtle sheen of denim. The women feel life-size and present, their bodies upright and self-possessed, with no surrounding scene to distract from their shared presence. The work is also unusual for Hendricks as a double portrait with two people sharing the frame without hierarchy, held together by rhythm (matching jeans, repeated whites, and parallel stances) while remaining distinctly themselves. Painted in the 1970s, when Hendricks was refining his life-size portraits of Black sitters, the picture pushes back against the long absence of Black women from “official” painting traditions ... and without asking them to perform anything except being exactly who they are. The result is intimate and iconic at once for a portrait of relationship, presence, and the quiet power of being seen on one's own terms.

"Sisters (Susan and Toni)" by Barkley L. Hendricks (American) - Oil and acrylic on canvas / 1977 - Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond, Virginia) #WomenInArt #BarkleyLHendricks #Hendricks #BarkleyHendricks #art #artText #BlackArt #BlackArtist #AfricanAmericanArt #VMFA #VirginiaMuseumofFineArts

Made in 1946 (immediately after World War II), “Sisters” sits in a pivotal moment in Japanese artist Fuku Akino’s (秋野不矩) career, when she was testing how far a modern sensibility could live inside the inherited language of Japanese painting. The work has the feel of a deliberate “between-space”: dignified, traditional on the surface, yet quietly experimental in how it uses the screen format to stage contrast ... like stillness against slight movement, pattern against pattern, or sameness against difference. That tension matters because Akino’s lifelong project was reinvention without severing roots. She was not rejecting tradition, but loosening it, just enough, to make room for a new kind of figure, a new kind of gaze, and a new kind of time. In that sense, these sisters can be read not only as people, but as a pair of ideas held together to show continuity and change, shared history and emerging selfhood, and a postwar world trying to recompose itself without pretending it hasn’t been transformed. The two sisters sit in quiet, close proximity across a two-fold screen format. Each Japanese woman wears a purple kimono, but the patterns differ, so the sisters read as related yet distinct. They are two presences in the same key, with variations in rhythm and detail. Their faces are rendered with restraint, the features simplified into calm planes and fine lines. Black hair is neatly arranged, and the bodies are held in composed, inward postures that suggest familiarity rather than performance. The garments do much of the speaking so the folds, collars, and obi (belt) give the painting its cadence, moving the viewer’s attention between texture, contour, and the subtle differences from one sister to the other. The screen structure itself heightens that comparison depicting two adjacent fields that invite you to look back and forth, noticing how repetition becomes relationship, and how small changes become character.

“姉妹 (Sisters)” by 秋野不矩 / Fuku Akino (Japanese) - Color on paper (two-fold screen) / 1946 - Hamamatsu City Fuku Akino Art Museum (Shizuoka, Japan) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #FukuAkino #秋野不矩 #Nihonga #JapaneseArt #art #artText #BlueskyArt #JapanesseArt #浜松市秋野不矩美術館 #秋野不矩美術館 #日本画

Mexican artist Diego Rivera painted this in Paris during his Cubist period, and it is also a candid portrait of his life there. A standing woman is his first wife, the artist Angelina Beloff, speaking with their friend and fellow artist Alma Dolores Bastián (nicknamed “Moucha”), who is seated. The setting is tied to their Montparnasse building at 26, Rue du Départ for an everyday studio world reframed through the avant-garde grammar of multiple viewpoints and flattened space. The two women fill a tall canvas built from crisp, interlocking planes. At left, Alma, in a white dress, reclines in a chair. Her bent arm and hands gather around a small book, its warm cover a rare block of earthy color amid cool grays. At right, Angelina, in a deep blue dress, leans slightly forward, hands clasped at her waist as if pausing mid-thought. Their faces, hair, and bodies are “broken” into facets with cheeks, collarbones, and sleeves suggested through angled shapes rather than smooth contour … so we experience them as both people and architecture. Behind the two ladies, a simplified Paris skyline rises in stacked blocks, turning rooftops and walls into a rhythmic backdrop. The mood is intimate but unsentimental showing two artists sharing space, attention, and conversation inside a modern city that feels close enough to press against the figures. The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts notes Rivera looked out on a “vast sea of rooftops” with a “rumble of trains” nearby, a sensory detail that fits the painting’s angular pulse of city and motion. The work’s comparatively lighter palette hints at Rivera’s next turn when he moved away from abstraction and toward socially legible imagery. Within a few years, shaped by revolution and the impact of Italian frescoes, he redirected his ambition into murals meant for broad public audiences, carrying this hard-won modern structure into storytelling about workers, politics, and Mexican history.

“Dos Mujeres” (Two Women) by Diego Rivera (Mexican) - Oil on canvas / 1914 - Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts (Little Rock, Arkansas) #WomenInArt #DiegoRivera #Rivera #ArkansasMuseumofFineArts #ArkMFA #Cubism #PortraitofWomen #art #AMFA #artText #BlueskyArt #MexicanArt #CubistArt #pintura #MexicanArtist

Painted in the year of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s divorce from Diego Rivera, this double self-portrait stages a visible split: love and loss as well as attachment and self-preservation. Two seated versions of Kahlo hold hands on a simple bench, facing us with steady, unsmiling expressions. Both have medium-brown skin, dark hair pulled up, and a bold unibrow that anchors their face. The left Frida wears a high-necked white lace dress in a European style. The right Frida wears a vivid dress associated with Tehuana clothing including a blue bodice with yellow accents and a full olive-green skirt. Each chest is opened to reveal a heart. A thin red blood vessel threads between them like a cord, linking heart to heart across the space. In the left figure’s lap, a small surgical clamp pinches a cut vessel as blood falls onto the white skirt in dark red stains. The right figure calmly holds a small oval portrait (a tiny image of Diego Rivera) in one hand. Behind them, a turbulent sky of gray-blue clouds swirls, amplifying the sense of exposure and emotional weather. The Tehuana-dressed Frida is often read as the “beloved” Frida and connected to Rivera through the miniature portrait and the unbroken vessel while the European-dressed Frida bleeds where that bond is severed. Kahlo turns private pain into anatomy with hearts rendered as organs, not symbols, insisting that heartbreak is bodily, real, and survivable only through intervention (the clamp) and care (the clasped hands). The work also holds Kahlo’s layered identity of Indigenous Mexico and European ancestry without choosing one over the other. The stormy background refuses closure because this isn’t a tidy before/after, but a moment of radical honesty where two selves sit together, witness each other, and stay.

“Las dos Fridas” (The Two Fridas) by Frida Kahlo (Mexican) - Oil on canvas / 1939 - Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City, Mexico) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #FridaKahlo #Kahlo #art #arte #artText #MuseoDeArteModerno #MAM #SelfPortrait #MexicanArt #MexicanArtist #LatinAmericanArt

Thanks so much for highlighting the #altText which describes the image and includes more about the artist. 🙏🏻😎

“Confidence” here is both secrecy and care. A whisper creates a private room inside an open landscape, and we are kept at the threshold … able to witness closeness without fully entering it. Painted as American artist Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau built a Paris career against gendered barriers (including late access to formal training), this painting is a subtle insistence that girls’ inner lives including friendship, counsel, and trust are serious subjects. Her wry claim to be “the best imitator of Bouguereau” lands differently here. The polish is academic, but the feeling is psychologically interior, anchored in what cannot be overheard. Two young women sit close on a low stone bench outdoors, tucked beneath dense, shadowed trees. Both have light-to-medium skin tones and dark hair parted at the center and pulled back. The woman on the left faces forward, shoulders slightly rounded inward, hands clasped in her lap as her bare feet rest on the earth. She wears a white blouse with gathered sleeves under a dark bodice and a cool blue-gray skirt, her expression guarded as she meets our gaze. The woman on the right leans in to whisper, lips near her companion’s ear, her body angled protectively toward her. A plum-violet shawl drapes over her blouse and brown skirt. Her bare feet touch the ground beside the other’s. In her left hand she holds a small folded paper, like a discreet note. A red earthenware jug sits in the foreground, and behind them rises a carved stone niche topped with a cross finial, lending the quiet scene a hushed, devotional gravity. The folded paper sharpens that tension, hinting at news, confession, or a promise passed hand to hand. The setting’s shrine stonework nudges the moment toward reflection like intimacy framed as something consequential or even moral. That reading aligns with the painting’s early life in Athens, where it was gifted to the Lucy Cobb Institute (an all-girls school) and cherished as quietly “instructive” for young women.

“La Confidence” by Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau (American) - Oil on canvas mounted on aluminum / c. 1880 - Georgia Museum of Art (Athens, Georgia) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomenArtists #ElizabethJaneGardnerBouguereau #GardnerBouguereau #artText #artwork #GeorgiaMuseumofArt #WomenPaintingWomen

Two Indigenous figures stand close together in an open, pale landscape, sharing one striped blanket that wraps around both bodies like a single shelter. Their skin appears medium brown and each has long black hair blown sideways by wind. The figure at left wears a vivid blue dress with a lighter collar detail while the other wears a tan top and a cool gray skirt, with turquoise-colored jewelry. Brown boots ground them. A small black-and-white dog lies low at their feet. Behind, the sky is drawn in large cloud shapes outlined in soft blue, punctuated by sharp orange zigzag lightning. A small, rounded blue form floats above, adding a symbolic, almost diagram-like storm sign. Fan-shaped blue plants and stones curve across the foreground, framing the pair in a quiet, watchful pause. Native multimedia artist of Comanche and Irish heritage, Opeche-Nah-Se (Diane O’Leary) turns weather into a kind of knowledge like an attentive reading of danger and change that lives in the body as much as in the eyes. The shared blanket makes an emotional argument that protection is collective, not solitary, and preparedness is an act of care. The clouds and lightning feel less like a “scene” than like icons while the dog’s crouched posture mirrors vigilance. Even so, the figures do not dramatize fear. They stand composed, shoulder-to-shoulder, as if naming what’s coming and choosing steadiness anyway. The image also insists that observation itself can be power with women as interpreters, guardians, and holders of lived expertise. O’Leary was widely noted for centering Native women in modernist, symbol-rich compositions. She had an extensive academic path and was a consistent activist with work shaped by commitments to Indigenous dignity, women’s equality, and environmental responsibility. "Watching the Weather" is more than a meteorological moment. It is a portrait of protective intelligence and women rendered as the ones who understand it, endure it, and keep others safe within it.

“Watching the Weather” by Opeche-Nah-Se / Diane O’Leary (Comanche) - Gouache on artist’s board / 1973 - Great Plains Art Museum (Lincoln, Nebraska) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #DianeOLeary #OpecheNahSe #GPAM #GreatPlainsArtMuseum #artText #art #WomenPaintingWomen #IndigenousArt

Thank you so much 🙏 for the words of encouragement. It means a lot that someone else appreciates the talents of the artists and museum curators who share it with us. Loïs Mailou Jones, in particular, deserves so much more recognition. 😎