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The lack of great women artist is that women were barred from the…

- - - - (page 30)
        Are there any qualities that may be said to have characterized them, as a group and as individuals? While we cannot investigate the subject in detail, we can point to a few striking general facts: almost all women artists were either the daughters of artist fathers, or later, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had a close personal connection with a strong or dominant male artist. This is, of course, not unusual for men artists either, as we have indicated in the case of artist fathers and sons: it is simply true almost without exception for their feminine counterparts, at least until quite recently.
- - - - (page 26)
        This was unthinkable for women, of course, and women were unable to compete until the end of the nineteenth century, by which time the whole academic system had lost its importance anyway. It seems clear, to use France in the nineteenth century as an example (a country which probably had a larger proportion of women artists than any other—in terms of their percentage in the total number of artists exhibiting in the Salon) that "women were not accepted as professional painters."
      - (Page 26) In the middle of the century, there were a third as many women as men artists, but even this mildly encouraging statistic is deceptive when we discover that out of this relatively meager number, none had attended that major stepping stone to artistic success, the ficole des Beaux-Arts, only 7 percent had received a Salon medal, and none had ever received the Legion of Honor.
- - - - (Page 27)
        Of course, we have not even gone into the "fringe" requirements for major artists, which would have been, for the most part, both physically and socially closed to women.
- - - - (page31)
        It would be interesting to investigate the role of benign, if not outright encouraging, fathers: both Kaethe Kollwitz and Barbara Hepworth, for example, recall the influence of unusually sympathetic and supportive fathers on their artistic pursuits
        
        Rosa Bonheur
        
        (page 31)
        It is instructive to examine one of the most successful and accomplished women painters of all time, Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899), whose work, despite the ravages wrought upon its estimation by changes of taste, still stands as an impressive achievement to anyone interested in the art of the nineteenth century and in the history of taste generally
        
        (page 32)
        The success of Rosa Bonheur emphasizes the role of institutions in relation to achievement in art. We might say that Bonheur picked a fortunate time to become an artist. She came into her own in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the struggle between traditional history painting, as opposed to the less pretestious and more free-wheeling genre painting, landscape, and still-life was won by the latter group, A major change in social and institutional support for art was under way: with the rise of the bourgeoisie, smaller paintings, generally of everyday subjects, rather than grandiose mythological or religious scenes, were much in demand
        
        (page 32)
        Daughter of an impoverished drawing master, Rosa Bonheur early showed her interest in art; she also exhibited an independence of spirit and liberty of manner which immediately earned her the label of tomboy. Although her attitude toward her father is somewhat ambiguous, clearly, he was influential in directing her toward her life's work.