Suppress your groans: this women-only show is fascinating

In a Victorian art dealer’s shop a woman waits with her young son while the supercilious owner examines her work; behind her two top-hatted gents interrupt their inspection of a drawing of a dancer in a tutu to give her the once-over. The woman’s shabby umbrella, propped against the counter, awaits reopening in the rain outside. She knows what the dealer will say, and so do we.

Every picture tells a story, and Emily Mary Osborn’s ‘Nameless and Friendless’ (1857) summarises the plot of Tate Britain’s latest exhibition, Now You See Us. Unlike her picture’s protagonist, Osborn was herself a successful artist in a field dominated by men – not the fate of many of the artists in the Tate’s new survey of four centuries of British art by women.

Suppress your groans at the prospect of another women-only show: the curators of this encyclopaedic exhibition haven’t flung together any old female artists in a gender-balance tick-box exercise. Instead they have sought out every female artist known to have practised and exhibited in Britain between 1520 and 1920 and compiled a fascinating blow-by-blow account of their struggles to achieve parity with men.

The exceptions – Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica Kauffman and Laura Knight – only prove the rule. To succeed, women had to play men at their own game, dispelling the perception that they could only copy – that they were good at painting flowers and portraits but couldn’t work from imagination. Kauffman challenged that myth in her allegory of a female artist practising ‘Invention’ (1778-80) – commissioned for the Council Chamber of the Royal Academy from whose deliberations, as a female member, she was excluded – but copycat works by less talented successors such as Mary Beale, whose portraits borrowed compositions from Lely and Van Dyck, tend to confirm it.