Good morning everyone,

What's going on with you today? I hope it's good and that you've got some good plans for the weekend. I was looking at my saved links and found out that there are loads of women artists that I've not written about in Fem Fri before, let's meet some of them!

We start with Laura Wheeler Waring. The foundation that bought a lot of her paintings was dissolved in the 1960s, so her work is sort of dispersed now. If you are someone who organises exhibitions, it might be nice to display some of her portraits together. Let me know if you do this as I'd definitely make the effort to see it. Here's her most famous portrait and a lovely long essay:

Although Waring became closely associated with her portraits of high-profile members of the African American elite, her most celebrated painting — the one most often reproduced as an indication of Waring at the height of her artistic talent — is of an unheralded, working-class woman named Annie Washington Derry with whom the upper-middle-class Waring interacted while working at Cheyney.

https://paheritage.wpengine.com/article/life-portrait-laura-wheeler-waring-anna-washington-derry/

Moving now to Finland, and Helene Schjerfbeck. The things we know about her life are really the things that she wants us to know. For example, we don't know the name or even the nationality of the man she was engaged to because she asked her friends to burn all letters that mentioned his name when he broke it off. And they all did! Delicious.

She made her name with a series of self portraits, but those aren't the ones that are engaging me right now. She also painted still lives as a palette cleanser between portraits:

And here's one of her earlier works, The Convalescent:

To a modern eye, the painting seems traditional but, first presented in Finland, it was deemed, according to Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff, “too modern, not polished enough, too French”. Unsurprisingly, the French liked it: it won a bronze medal in Paris and was bought by the Ateneum and has been a favourite with gallery-goers ever since. Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff says: “It is the subject that draws people because it is about hope – an unusually positive picture in modern art.”

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/jul/06/helene-schjerfbeck-finnish-painter-royal-academy

Now, here's an artist with a very limited online footprint (I mean, information about her online – she was born at the turn of the last century – I don't expect her to be maintaining an active Tik Tok presence). Anyway, Dorothy Holeman was a South East London artist – here's a view towards Greenwich:

As you know I love still lives, here's one of hers:

And here she is on her wedding day. I really like her little hat.

Much love,

Alex.