An exhibition opening in Edinburgh this month will shine a light on the work of female Scottish artists stretching back two and a half centuries – and, say its organisers, draw attention to work too often overlooked or written out of the art historical canon.

Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years Of Challenging Perception will be held at the Dovecot Studios, the capital’s famous tapestry studio, and is being mounted in collaboration with the London-based Fleming Collection, which holds one of the largest collections of Scottish art outside the national collections.

“This is a way for us to help remind people that women artists have had a place, and an influential place, in Scottish art for the last 250 years,” said Ben Reiss, exhibition manager and curator at Dovecot Studios. “The other meaning we hope the title conveys is the perception that the artists themselves challenged in their lives and in their careers – this idea, which was very baldly stated for much of the period we’re talking about, that women couldn’t paint and couldn’t be artists. The women we have selected, through their practice and through their lives, very much gave the lie to these perceptions. And they played a key role in changing and challenging those perceptions.”

The Herald: Left, A Cellist by Beatrice Huntington. Right, The Artist's Daughter, Nancy, As A Harlequin by Mabel Pryde Left, A Cellist by Beatrice Huntington. Right, The Artist's Daughter, Nancy, As A Harlequin by Mabel Pryde (Image: The Fleming Collection © The William Syson Foundation)

Among the artists featured is Catherine Read, born into an affluent Dundee family in 1723 and a niece of Sir John Wedderburn, 5th Baronet of Blackness, who fought alongside Charles Edward Stuart at Culloden in 1746. Captured after the battle, he was taken to London and hanged – forcing Catherine to join the rest of her family in fleeing to France. It was there that she made history by becoming the first Scottish woman to be trained as an artist.

“In Paris she had the opportunity to study in the studios of a number of French artists which was an opportunity she probably wouldn’t have had if she had stayed in Scotland,” said Mr Reiss.

Among the artists she took instruction from was Maurice Quentin De La Tour, a portraitist whose subjects included Voltaire, Rousseau and Louis XV. She later moved to Rome and eventually settled back in London in 1753.

“When she returned to London, she was able to set up her own practice and became a fashionable portrait painter of society figures, counting Queen Charlotte among her clients, commanding comparable fees to her male peers such as Thomas Gainsborough, and having her work reproduced extensively through mezzotints as well as creating her own oil paintings.”

It’s a mezzotint by Catherine Read which features in the exhibition. Not that you will find mention of it or her in seminal art history books such as Ernst Gombrich’s 1950 work The Story Of Art.

In that book the celebrated art historian mentions only one woman: Käthe Kollwitz, a German painter and printer who was banned from exhibiting by the Nazis and died just days before the end of the Second World War aged 77.

“It’s symptomatic of that general attitude,” said Mr Reiss. “The way the history of art has been written about and discussed for the last couple of hundred years has been very much by men, about men and for men. That has led to a large number of women artist being written out of the story [and] illustrates the issue artists like Catherine Read faced when it came to their reputations – being forgotten about and written out of history.”

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The Dovecot show also features work by artists such as Mabel Pryde, Beatrice Huntington and Millie Frood, who were among the first generation of female artists to be art school trained. Alongside them is work by Joan Eardley, Dame Elizabeth Blackadder, Anne Redpath, Joyce Cairns (the current president of the Royal Scottish Academy and the first woman to hold the position) and Victoria Crowe, whose 2019 tapestry Richer Twilight, Venice is based on a painting of the city.

Bringing the show up to date is new work by trailblazing contemporary artists such as Rachel Maclean, Alberta Whittle and Scots-Zimbabwean Sekai Machache.

The Herald: A detail from Lively Blue by Sekai Machache during weaving at Dovecot StudiosA detail from Lively Blue by Sekai Machache during weaving at Dovecot Studios (Image: Dovecot Studios)

The Herald: A detail from SAVE ME by Rachel MacleanA detail from SAVE ME by Rachel Maclean (Image: Rachel Maclean)

Alberta Whittle, who represented Scotland at the 2022 Venice Biennale, will show the tapestry she displayed there, the original watercolour design for it and a new work only recently cut from the loom at Dovecot. Titled Flowers And Black Cat, it is based on a 1976 work by Dame Elizabeth Blackadder.

Meanwhile Ms Maclean’s trademark pop culture motifs – she draws on everything from cat videos to horror movies and reality TV – have been turned into a series of rugs made using a tufting gun, and Ms Machache will display her tapestry Lively Blue, specially commissioned for the exhibition.

Based on an ink study, it poses questions about colonisation through its use of indigo – sometimes referred to as “slavery’s other cash crop” on account of its proliferation in America before cotton became the slave owning plantation owners’ product of choice.

Referencing the interaction between these cutting-edge contemporary artists and the medium of tapestry, Dovecot director Celia Joicey said the exhibition “has provided fresh stimulus for us to create work with a new generation of artists. Exploring issues from the environment and sustainability, to colonial history and self-image, it’s exciting to see tapestry being developed as both medium and message.”

Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years Of Challenging Perception opens on July 28 and runs until January 6, 2024.