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Caterina van Hemessen: An unknown visual pioneer
By Kelly Grovier8th March 2021
For International Women s Day, BBC Culture launches its new series looking at female artists who helped shape the way we see the world. Kelly Grovier finds out how the first self-portrait of an artist at work at an easel was painted by a woman – Caterina van Hemessen.
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Think creative genius and a parade of self-portraits from the history of art, each brooding intensely before an unfinished canvas, flashes across your mind. You know the ones: from the rumpled nobility of Rembrandt s Self-Portrait with Two Circles (1665) to the smouldering introspection of Vincent van Gogh s iconic Self-Portrait as a Painter (1886), from the bashful gaze of Francisco Goya s Self-Portrait in a Studio (1790) to the circumspect squint of Paul Gauguin s Self-Portrait with a Palette (1894). So masculine is the stereotype of the aloof artist, lifting his paintbrush like an existential barbell freighted with psychological