Claims that few women painted often ignore how records were made. Works were attributed to fathers, husbands or famous male masters; signatures went unread, domestic production was labelled craft, and academies restricted access to life drawing. Invisibility was therefore produced across generations rather than occurring once.nnToday’s reattributions do more than add lost names to a list.
They question who defined standards such as quality, scale and worthy subject matter. Correcting history does not mean assigning every anonymous work to a woman; it means reading archives suspiciously and asking why evidence was never produced where we are told none exists.
