Wautier teases out the personalities of her sitters: the open innocence of the boy holding his nose at the scent of a bad egg; the complexity of an Italian Jesuit, Martino Martini, who had worked in China depicted depicts in traditional Chinese court attire;

Until recently – and in some circles, even now – you’d hear whispers about how women artists of the past simply couldn’t paint. There are all sorts of reasons why they would have found it difficult: women weren’t given the opportunities men were – to train, to belong to artists’ organisations, to practice by drawing nudes (always an essential basis for learning). At various points in history they were barred from selling their work, and they were often limited to certain kinds of art – needlework, textiles, tapestries. If they did paint, convention restricted them to certain topics, such as flowers and still lifes.

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