Tate Britain

It wasn’t unusual for women to paint in the seventeenth century, it was just unusual for them to live off it. Art was meant to be a hobby for women of the upper classes, a leisure activity for ladies who lunched. Doing art professionally, seriously, that was for the men. But the Tate’s had enough of that bogus, patronising attitude and are hellbent on showing that anything men could do – even really ugly paintings – women could do too. Across these walls here is 400 years of women artists going toe to toe with the men. Society portraiture, allegorical painting, you name it, they could do it.  The show puts its best fighter first. Two paintings by Italian renaissance giant Artemisia Gentileschi open the show; an amazingly stark, tight-cropped, twisted self-portrait and a stunning, confrontational but vulnerable vision of the Old Testament story of Susanna. Gentileschi was a success: she ran her own studio, joined an academy, painted from life; she thrived professionally, something the rest of the artists here struggled to make happen. The rest of the opening rooms, filled with Angelica Kauffmans and incredibly over-the-top Maria Cosways, tell a tale of injustice, of a world where painting for money was ‘improper’ for women, where critics attacked them for ‘weak’ figuration despite them not being allowed into life drawing classes. The quality of the art here isn’t really what matters (though a huge Cosway painting of the Duchess of Devonshire as a moon goddess is the most incre