Women Behind the Art

Though her Identity is not known, this portrait suggests a well-to-do family. Her portrait was meant to preserve her image into the afterlife.

Beatrice Portinari was the daughter of a wealthy Florentine banker and married into the Bardi family. She died young at about 25. Her legacy lives on through Dante’s writings, including The Divine Comedy, as his muse─despite the fact they barely met.

The daughter of King Henri II of France, Elizabeth was only 14 at the time of her wedding to Spain's King Philip II. Their marriage was part of peace negotiations ending 60 years of war between France and Spain.

A divorced woman (shocking at the time!) and a celebrated writer living in Venice, Marini also ran a lively literary salon that was frequented by English Romantic poet Lord Byron.

Fanny Waugh Hunt died before her husband had completed her portrait. The painting was begun in Florence, Italy, during late summer of 1866, where Fanny posed for Hunt behind a chair that concealed her pregnancy. Fanny died two months later of complications from the delivery.

Dubourg was a successful still life painter who specialized in flowers. However, Parisian women artists still faced tremendous challenges, with many of their fellow male artists (even, at times, Dubourg’s own husband, painter Henri Fantin-Latour) often dismissing their talent.

Watson worked as a janitor for the U.S. State Department. She was living in an apartment in Washington, D.C., raising her adopted daughter and grandchildren as a single parent. Her image became symbolic of racial inequalities in the nation's capital and the nation at large.