Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain review: strikingly powerful

This paper’s critic, Brian Sewell, once observed that “there has never been a first rank woman artist … only men are capable of aesthetic greatness”. That went down really well.

If he had seen this exhibition, would it have made him think again? Well, he might have conceded that there were some very considerable women artists working in Britain in the four centuries covered by this exhibition, as well as many less stellar talents.

In a way, this comprehensive show – every woman artist you’ve ever heard of who worked in Britain plus lots you probably haven’t – does a disservice to the best, by putting them with inferior contemporaries on the basis they’re all women. Note that it’s Women artists in Britain, not British artists, which is just as well.

At the start we have Artemisia Gentileschi, including her superb depiction of herself as the essential artist, her head cocked to one side as she contemplates her canvas. She was the equal of her father Orazio and powerfully influenced by Caravaggio, her father’s friend. At the end, there’s Gwen John, now rated more highly than her brother Augustus. Her self-portrait on the poster is contained, restrained but powerful. Like her, then.

The success of Artemisia and Gwen John help explain why other women artists struggled. Artemisia was the daughter of an important painter; Gwen John trained at the Slade in the 1890s which was open to both sexes. For those women who didn’t have family connections or a place at an institution like the Slade there’s a sorry tale of exclusion from the salons, studios and life classes which their male contemporaries frequented.

Yet those women who did make their mark were lionised precisely as female artists, like Angelica Kauffman. She was one of the few women who unhesitatingly tackled history and epic, interestingly from a female perspective, in a spirit of sentimental classicism. Those genres and that style haven’t worn well but she was highly rated by her contemporaries. She was a founding member of the Royal Academy along with the flower painter, Mary Moser. There are some terrific botanical paintings (a safe genre for the ladies) here including flamboyant florals by Mary Delaney.

Frustratingly, some women’s work simply doesn’t survive, as with Levina Teerlinc an admired Flemish Tudor miniaturist; the portraits here attributed to her are just a fraction of her output.

Several women surmounted all the odds to work as professionals. Mary Beale was a prolific portraitist who channeled Peter Lely without the perviness. Her husband ran her studio and she roped in her sons as assistants and models.

Katherine Read, a distinguished Scottish portrait painter, trained on the continent and visited the celebrated pastel artist, Rosalba Carriere; some of her own output was pastels, dismissed as a female medium. Unluckily for Katherine, she’s in the same room as Maria Cosway, whose depiction of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, pacing through the sky as the moon goddess is memorably frightful.

There’s other genres besides. Sculpture includes a serene bust of Christ by the black/native American Edmonia Lewis, who trained in Rome (she was a Catholic) and ended up on Blythe Road. To its credit, the Tate reproduces her observation that “Some praise me because I am a coloured girl and I don’t want that kind of praise”.

Then there are photographs including Julia Margaret Cameron’s astonishing portrait studies. She, like Gwen John and Angelika Kaufmann, have recently been the subject of exhibitions in their own right.

The premise of the show, that women artists are usually overlooked, is much less true than it was. But as we are reminded, a number of female artists were popular successes in the 19th century; Elizabeth Butler’s poignant depiction of Crimean War veterans, The Roll Call, was such a popular draw that police had to control the crowds coming to see it at the Royal Academy. She was nearly elected to the Academy.

So what are the characteristics of women artists given their infinite diversity – as demonstrated by a show that includes Helen Allingham’s pretty watercolours of country cottages and Nina Hamnet’s forbidding Der Sturm?

Perhaps a tenderness towards child subjects, a less eroticised approach to female nudes, not including Henrietta Rae’s awful simpering Bacchante. Having said which, one of the most striking of the moderns is Anna Airey, the first female war artist, whose depiction of a munitions factory in Glasgow is strikingly powerful. Nothing girly about her.

Tate Britain, May 16 to October 13; tate.org.uk