Why should art have ever been considered a male preserve?

‘I’m a lady,’ insists the improbable damozel in David Walliams’s Little Britain sketch. I’m a lady, I kept thinking, reading these two books. More: I’m a lady art historian. Oughtn’t I to like books by other lady art historians about lady artists and ladies in art. Why don’t I? Why so out of sync with the sisterhood?

Start with the positive. Jennifer Higgie’s The Mirror and the Palette follows an interesting, original line: ‘If she had access to a mirror, a palette, an easel and paint, a woman could endlessly reflect on her face and, by extension, her place in the world.’ Higgie, editor-at-large at frieze magazine and the host of the (excellent, enjoyable) art history podcast Bow Down, considers the lives and ambitions of a series of women artists in the light of the self-portraits they painted. There are big names — Artemisia Gentileschi, Sofonisba Anguissola, Judith Leyster, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Angelica Kauffman, Gwen John, Leonora Carrington — and hidden gems such as Helene Schjerfbeck from Finland and the Australians Margaret Preston and Nora Heysen.

The prologue opens with a modern translation from Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (1405): ‘Anyone who wanted could cite plentiful examples of exceptional women in the world today: it’s simply a matter of looking for them.’ Higgie has looked and she has found. Often what she has found is absence. In the first editions of E. H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art (1962) and H.W. Janson’s History of Art (1962) not a single woman artist is mentioned. Kenneth Clark’s The Nude (1956) musters not one woman painter or sculptor. In the index, under ‘woman’ are listed: ‘condemnations of; crouching; old; nudes of; prehistoric; statues of; as virgin.’

Women aren’t merely left out, they are actively excluded — from studios, from workshops, from art colleges, clubs and academies.