We Have a Winner!

Congratulations to Anneke Newman of Australia for correctly identifying the 35 painters whose works appeared in the most recent contest on Underpaintings. Solving this task required a lot of research, and Annke deserves the prizes she earned.

This was a tough contest, not just for the contestants, but for me as well. I knew what my theme would be when I began preparing this quiz, namely, portraits of women artists by women artists (including self-portraits), but finding images was sadly not as easy as it should have been. There were many female artists whom I wished to include, like Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau, Marianne Stokes, Henrietta Rae, Annie Louise Swynnerton, and Anna Lea Merritt, but I was unable to find works of theirs that fit my motif.

This first stumbling block became a boon, however, because it forced me to discover many talented artists I had previously not known. Soon, though, I encountered a second, two-fold obstacle; a dearth of biographical information on many of these female artists, and what was available, was often in a language I could not interpret. This led to my first mistake- a portrait of Hanna Pauli which I thought was a self-portrait, but turned out to be a painting by her husband, Georg Pauli (I replaced this image when I discovered my error). My second mistake, I did not discover until I was preparing this post: image #19 is of Canadian artist Helen Galloway McNicoll, but it is not a self-portrait- it was painted by artist Robert Harris. Unfortunately, the misconception on this fact is one I encountered on many, many online sites (because of this, I accepted McNicoll as the correct answer). Lastly, it's quite possible that there is another mistake in my solution to this test, and that is with image #34, the self-portrait by Hungarian painter Paczka Ferencné, the identification of which seemed to give contestants the most difficulty. I have also found her listed as Ferencné Paczka, and as Kornélia Wagner, which may have been her maiden name (it seems her husband's name was Paczka Ferenc and I am not sure if, culturally, this affects her name). I hope to find the definitive answer soon.

For the contest, I concentrated mainly on artists who were working during the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, because this is the period from which many of my favorite painters come. If ever I complained that the male artists from that time have been ignored by art historians, I have found that female artists from that same era were even more so disregarded. I hope that in the future that this slight of skilled artists, whether male or female, will be corrected.

To see more work by female artists from the late nineteenth century, visit the site Women's Art at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893. It is an excellent overview of the female artists from that period, and was of great inspiration for my contest.

Thank you to everyone who participated in this contest. I look forward to the next one, when we top 1000 followers!

Anna Bilínska-Bohdanowicz, Self-Portrait with Apron and Brushes, 1887

Rosina Emmet Sherwood, Portrait of Cecilia Beaux, 1892

Gretchen Woodman Rogers, Woman in Fur Hat (self-portrait), ca. 1915

Kate Lehman, Self-Portrait, 2005

Cecilia Beaux, Self-Portrait, 1885

Elin Danielson-Gambogi, Self-Portrait, 1900

Juliette Aristedes, Self-Portrait

Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Self-Portrait, 1790

Ellen Day Hale, Self-Portrait, 1885

Lydia Field Emmet, Self-Portrait, 1912

Elizabeth Nourse, Self-Portrait, 1892

Alice Pike Barney, Self-Portrait

Alexandra Tyng, Self-Portrait

Anna Elizabeth Klumpke, Portrait of Rosa Bonheur (study), 1898

Emily Maria Eardley Childers, Self-Portrait, 1889

Bertha Wegmann, Portrait of Jeanna Bauck, 1881

Louise-Catherine Breslau, Self-Portrait, 1904

Käthe Kollwitz, Self-Portrait, 1898

Robert Harris, Portrait of Helen Galloway McNicoll, 1910

Amy Kann, Portrait of Rachel Constantine, Philadelphia Painter

Cecilia Beaux, Self-Portrait, 1925

Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun, Self-Portrait, 1790

Hildegard Thorell, Painting of Fanny Brate, 1918

Lilla Cabot Perry, Self-Portrait, ca. 1889-1896

Alyssa Monks, Chrome (Self-Portrait), 2006

Bertha Wegmann, Portrait of Swedish Painter Jeanna Bauck, 1887

Patricia Watwood, Creation (Self-Portrait), 2006

Angelica Kauffman, Self-Portrait, 1784

Mary Cassatt, Self-Portrait, 1880

Dame Laura Knight, Self-Portrait, 1913

Rose-Adélaïde Ducreux, Self-Portrait with a Harp, 1791

Marie Bashkirtseff, Self-Portrait with a Palette, ca. 1883

Lea Colie Wight, Self-Portrait, 2008

Paczka Ferencné, Self-Portrait

Hanna Hirsch-Pauli, Portrait of Artist Venny Soldan-Brofeldt, ca. 1887