Episode 2 The Story of Women and Art

My search to uncover female creativity,

and what stood in the way of it,

began 500 years ago in Renaissance Italy,

where our modern idea of Western art and the artist was born.

And that artist was male.

The ideal Italian woman hardly ever left her house, even to shop.

So I marvelled at the resourcefulness

and bloody-minded nerve of those women who had outflanked

convention to make a lasting mark with their art.

I think that's the biggest painting by a female artist I've ever seen.

By the 18th century, it was Britain that led the world in wealth,

industry and innovation.

Despite being classed as artistic inferiors, exceptional women

grasped the moment to create art

and not just in traditional forms,

realising their imagination in entirely novel ways.

The 18th century was an era of dynamic,

technological and economic change,

presenting a galaxy of fresh opportunities

for canny women to seize.

Like the woman who became the first female sculptor in Britain,

commissioned by the great and the good.

Or the designer whose work revitalised

the British silk industry and featured on dresses across the world.

Or the history painter collected on these walls

who took her art on to the breakfast tables of Britain.

While in France,

the other great economic power of the 18th century, two women -

a portrait painter and a fashion designer - glamorised a queen,

immortalising the image of Europe's most glittering court.

Female ingenuity built, decorated, wove

and clothed this shiny new world.

And this is the story of how they did it.

At first glance, though,

the female contribution to the image of Georgian Britain seems slight.

The architecture and art of this period

looked like a monument to the talents of men.

Palatial houses, designed and decorated by architect Robert Adam,

walls gleaming with the oils of Joshua Reynolds

and Thomas Gainsborough, define the age.

But what I see is a landscape shaped and styled by women,

and blanketed with their work.

From tapestry and embroidery to watercolours and miniatures,

to entire interiors, a world in themselves.

But this was art behind closed doors,

amateur art,

a word just coming into use to mean someone who practised for love,

not payment.

But amateurish was not the put-down it is today.

In this grand setting in rural Wales,

a body of amateur work, made here at Erddig Hall,

reveals just how imaginative 18th century women could be.

This is one of the most surprising objects

I've ever seen created by a female amateur.

It's literally fantastic.

It's a Chinese pagoda.

It's based on a fantasy idea of the East,

part of chinoiserie, which was very fashionable in the 1760s and 1770s.

It's made of wood on velum,

which is a kind of treated calfskin,

and then it's encrusted with mica, which is a ground-up mineral

and with mother-of-pearl and little bits of coloured glass.

But in these shivering Chinese bells,

I think we can still feel the imagination of the artist.

This mix of manual dexterity, architectural knowledge

and wild fantasy would be remarkable in any provincial amateur,

male or female.

But even more surprisingly, the maker wasn't mistress of this house,

or even an accomplished daughter...

she was one of the servants.

She was christened Elizabeth Ratcliffe

but known to the family as Betty the Little.

She dedicated her life to the Yorkes,

working for them in London and here at Erddig for over 30 years.

But Betty was no ordinary servant.

Betty Ratcliffe was hired by the mistress of the house,

Dorothy Yorke, and trained up to be a governess and lady's maid.

But remarkably, alongside her tutorial and menial duties,

and for 18th century servants these where demanding,

Ratcliffe developed an aptitude for art and craft.

Doubtless, she inherited her eye for detail from her clockmaker father.

Such sublime arty craftiness

could have been seen as an absurd affectation in a servant,

but for the interest of the young squire,

Philip Yorke.

So, Betty was painfully aware that she owed her opportunity

to her master's indulgence,

as this deferential letter to him demonstrates.

"Chester, July 12th 1770.

"Honoured Sir, I yesterday received the honour of your letter

"and will, to the utmost of my power,

"endeavour to execute what you're pleased to request,

"instead of command."

He's commissioning her to produce these models and pictures

and pieces of needlework.

And in fact, we know from other letters

that she fulfilled other commissions for his friends.

So, he seems to have fostered her artistic endeavour

and been very proud of her.

And Erddig is still proud of Betty's achievements.

Delicate paper cuts and artful silk flowers

show off feminine accomplishment.

But there's another model that demonstrates

the less conventional side of Betty's artistic ambition.

This is a model of the ruins of the Temple of the Sun at Palmyra,

which is in Syria.

It's one of those many sites of excavations and ruins

that were being rediscovered in the 18th century,

setting off a new wave of neoclassicism.

Her version, though, is rather feminised and romanticised,

because it's dripping, these ruins, with creepers and plants.

So, it's as if it's glimpsed in a romantic dream.

It has a touch of the fairy tale about it.

The family must have been exceedingly proud of it

and of her talents,

because they commissioned a special cabinet

from a London cabinet-maker to show it off.

Why did Betty craft a Syrian temple?

The answer lies in the renewed fashion for all things classical,

which swept Europe from the 1760s onwards,

influencing everything from architecture to wallpaper design.

I'd lay money that Betty had seen the architectural plates

in a bestselling book about the ruins of Palmyra.

So, the very latest breakthroughs in aesthetics

had percolated down from the lofty realms of the male cultural elite

to a servant.

But surely this would rankle with everyone else in the house?

A servant making temples? Has the world turned upside down?

Well, we get some sense from a rather irritated letter

from his mother, Dorothy, who,

after all, is tasked with running the household.

This is in June 1768.

"Betty the Little is at work for you,

"but pray, my dear, do not employ her in that way again

"for one year, at least. All her improvements sink in drawing

"and then I shall never have service from her

"and make too fine a lady of her,

"for so much is said on that occasion that it rather puffs up."

I'm struck by the extraordinary scope of Elizabeth Ratcliffe's visual imagination.

Amateurism was no disengaged, old-fashioned backwater,

it was at the very cutting edge of the tastes and preoccupations of the age.

Female handicrafts are ancient.

The Bible urged women to use their needles to beautify the home.

But the 18th century was the first time manufacturers

and retailers spotted a fertile market for the taking.

And just like today, with a neat box of water-colours or a craft kit,

almost anyone with time and spare cash could have a go.

I've always been fascinated

by this weird and wonderful set of interlocking boxes,

which have been kept in the store here at the Museum of London.

It's probably from the 1790s,

it's a bit of a tardis of femininity.

On the top here, a really exquisite piece of embroidery in chenille

and then you go down through the layers of the box.

This layer is celebrating feather work.

What women do is take the feathers off one bird,

and reapply them to create images of others.

And then into the next box,

this lot have been stuck with artificial ivy leaves.

In the corners, we have this sort of chiffon work

and then, the final box.

Here, this is cut spangles,

which can be bought in leaves

and then you cut it out for yourself

and make your pattern and then sew it on.

And then sequin spangles,

rather like sequins you might still buy today.

Cumulatively, I'm amazed by the testimony

these shrimp pink boxes once gave to the diversity,

the fertility and the ingenuity of female crafts.

However, public opinion considered a woman's arts and crafts

to be for private viewing, by friends and family only.

They were certainly not to be seen by the general public

or sold for money.

The world of professional art was still clearly male.

And that's what made the opening of the Royal Academy of Arts

in London in 1768 such an apparent step forward for women.

For the first time, the full range of female creativity

was to be displayed and celebrated.

The academy had three goals - to put on shows of contemporary art,

to protect the professional interests of its members,

and thirdly, to offer training.

Perhaps the moment for female artists had finally come.

But in the stalls of the academy

is this famous engraving of its founders.

The male members gathered for a life-drawing class

still look to me just like a Boys' Own club.

32 men, two women.

The two founding female members,

Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffmann...

They're only here as portraits,

not people, sidelined.

The engraving epitomises ambivalent attitudes

to female artists in the period.

Able to work but denied equality,

subject to a different and altogether more demanding set of rules.

Initially, the academy made an open call for art to show

at its annual exhibitions.

And that did include women's crafts.

But within just one year,

the type of art that women practised to perfection,

posed a threat to the prestige of the fledgling institution.

I've got here the minutes of the members of the academy

for the 9th of April, 1770.

There's clearly been some internal argy-bargy.

"Resolved that no needle-work, artificial flowers, cut paper,

"shell-work, or any such baubles,

"shall be admitted into the exhibition."

What the Royal Academy is doing there, in 1770,

is institutionalising the boundary between professional and amateur,

drawing a sharp line between the largely male world of painting,

sculpture and architecture

and the overwhelmingly female world of applied art and craft.

The Royal Academy's ruling was not a perverse exception.

They were re-enforcing age-old prejudices.

In the hierarchy of art,

sculpture and paintings depicting epic events were at the top...

needlework, at the very bottom.

And philosophers like Rousseau knew which category

women should confine themselves to.

"At no cost would I want them to learn landscape,

"even less the human figure.

"Foliage, fruits, flowers and drapery is all they need to know

"to create their own embroidery pattern."

So what of the only two female artist members?

They where thriving.

One, flower painter Mary Moser,

had become a favourite of the Queen,

provoking envy in the men when she won a lucrative commission

to paint a garden room in the royal villa.

The other, who would have an even greater impact, was a Swiss artist,

already celebrated across Europe and now living in London.

Renowned for her talent, sweetness and charm,

her name was Angelica Kauffmann.

Kauffmann was so well-known

that she was seen to lend a bit of cachet and glamour

to the new Royal Academy

and was even asked to paint four ceiling decorations

for the Royal Academy council chamber,

now here in the entrance hall,

depicting invention, composition, colour and design.

Kauffmann scrimped to establish her studio,

here in Golden Square in London,

in sufficient style to attract the posh for their portraits.

When she was asked by England's premier artist, Sir Joshua Reynolds,

to paint his portrait, her reputation seemed assured.

But the very fact of her success attracted malicious whispers.

Virtually every artist she associated with

was rumoured to be in love with her,

including the eminent Sir Joshua, fuelling the suspicion

that Angelica owed her career more to flirtation than to talent.

Given her prodigious celebrity, though, it's easy to overlook

the sheer scale of the challenge she faced.

To be truly acclaimed a great, she had to master history painting,

the most prestigious genre.

But here, she confronted her toughest obstacle.

History painting was the most highly rated art in 18th-century Europe.

That's a classical, biblical or historical scene on a broad canvas.

It was supposed to be founded on philosophical understanding

and abstract thought - things women were believed incapable of.

As a French critic scoffed,

"Women's lively imaginations are like mirrors that reflect all

"and create nothing."

To achieve her ambition,

Kauffmann not only had to overcome such prejudice,

she had to find a way out of a catch-22.

History paintings were packed with full-length figures

in dynamic poses, often scantily clad.

A convincing attempt required detailed knowledge of human anatomy,

the training of which was something the Royal Academy

had been specifically set up to provide,

even offering lectures from surgeons.

This painting shows the leading anatomist, William Hunter,

lecturing artists.

They are all male.

Propriety barred women from the life-drawing class.

No 18th-century lady could do what I'm doing -

gazing at this naked man, never mind drawing him.

What was Kauffmann to do?

Her sketch book shows how she tackled

her modest ignorance of the male body.

This is some sort of Roman or Greek hero in his sandals

and with a bit of a cape over his arm,

his muscles are sharply delineated.

He has, you know, the impressive pecs and also this muscle here

that footballers like to show off in underwear adverts...

..but what's missing is the very thing that defines manhood.

He's completely smooth in the loins, rather like Barbie's Ken.

And, in a nutshell, this demonstrates the problem

that Angelica Kauffmann faces.

If she can show that she understands the male body,

a male genitalia,

and has been caught copying it,

then her reputation would be blown,

smashed to smithereens.

But on the other hand,

without detailed, exact knowledge of the male body in movement,

she would never, ever become a great history painter.

She's damned if she did

and damned if she didn't.

Kauffmann was not prepared to risk her reputation

and restricted herself to sketching sculptures,

a poor second to flesh and blood bodies.

But ingeniously, she managed to make a virtue of that necessity.

Saltram House, in Devon,

has a unique collection of history paintings,

which hold the key to how Kauffmann tried to overcome

the obstacle of anatomy.

I'm standing in front of a wall of Kauffmann's history paintings.

Here, we have Penelope Taking Down The Bow Of Ulysses.

And this painting epitomises one of her favourite strategies, which is

focusing on the female heroines of classical and British myth.

But when Kauffmann chose to depict men as men,

she used, what is for me, one her most ingenious strategies.

I'm sure most male painters would have chosen to present

Hector out on the battlefield defending Troy.

Instead, Kauffmann presents him

saying farewell to the lovely Andromache,

who's weeping, "Don't leave me,

"don't make me a widow, don't make our son an orphan."

Perhaps men wanted blood and guts in their history paintings, but ladies

preferred something altogether softer

and more sentimental for their homes.

In this way, Kauffmann feminised the genre

and changed art history in the process.

But her reputation has suffered since

because of the weakness of her anatomical knowledge,

which the Royal Academy had not helped her rectify.

And if painting in the grand manner was difficult,

without training in life drawing, another art form, sculpture,

would surely be impossible?

Not quite.

In 1784, a sculpture by a woman was accepted for exhibition

by the Royal Academy.

So how on earth did she manage it?

Anne Seymour Damer was unconventional, self-reliant,

cosmopolitan and privileged

and she drew on all these advantages

to take on the ultimate male preserve in art

and emerge as the first female sculptor in Britain.

The River Thames, near Henley,

is the unlikely home to two of Anne Seymour Damer's public works,

although getting a good look at them can be tricky.

Damer carved the two keystones

on either side of Henley Bridge in 1787.

On this side, we've got the river god Thame.

We can tell he's of the river because of the fishes in his beard

and the bulrushes at his temple.

On the other side, we have his female counterpart, Isis.

They are easy to miss, but they represent the intriguing story

of what a woman had to risk and withstand to leave her mark.

From the first, fate dealt Anne an unusually promising hand.

She was born into a powerful and enlightened family.

Her father was a statesman,

who employed the philosopher David Hume as his secretary.

Her aristocratic mother befriended leading artists.

As their only child, Anne was lavished with the kind of learned

and worldly education normally reserved for men.

But her unusual interest in sculpture was only ignited by chance.

Out strolling with David Hume,

they encountered an Italian boy carrying plaster model figures.

Hume stopped to admire the boy's models,

but Damer was sneeringly dismissive,

to Hume's annoyance.

He chided her, "I bet you can't produce anything better."

Her pride was then piqued and she was determined to prove him wrong.

Resenting the implication,

she got hold of tools and a block of marble to demonstrate her skill.

Her indulgent parents paid for tuition from practising sculptors

and from an eminent surgeon and anatomist.

Anne now had the very knowledge that the Royal Academy denied to women.

But her career was barely off the ground before it was derailed

by what can best be called an unfortunate marriage.

Aged 17, Anne was married off to the son of a lord, John Damer.

It was not a love match,

and the lack of sympathy was confounded by his gross extravagance

and massive gambling debts.

After seven years, her patience ran out and she separated from him,

inviting public censure.

But far worse scandal was to come.

Two years later, in 1776,

in a pub near here in Covent Garden,

after a long night's entertainment with four prostitutes

and a blind fiddler,

John Damer put a pistol to his head

and shot himself.

Rising from the ashes of scandal,

it was in widowhood that Anne Damer's career began to take off.

The style she adopted was neoclassicism,

as befitted her avid study of Latin and Greek.

This is a marble bust of the actress Elizabeth Farren

in the guise of the muse of comedy

and idyllic poetry, Thalia.

So, she has a bit of classical drapery over her bosom

and she's crowned with a wreath of ivy leaves.

So, in many ways, this is quite a conventional bust.

But remember, it's created by a woman

and a formidably educated woman, at that.

And Damer wants to make sure that point is remembered.

So, she's chiselled on the side in Greek...

"Anna Damer, of London, made me."

What she's asserting here is that there's substance

behind her classical style...

that she's a thinker as well as a maker.

The bust was praised,

but Damer, going on to further works,

was now encroaching on the territory of her male contemporaries.

And they responded and not with any generosity.

Gossip bubbled about her appearance.

One painter, Joseph Farington,

reported in his diary in 1798,

"The singularities of Mrs Damer are remarkable.

"She wears a man's hat and shoes

"and a jacket also like a man's.

"Thus, she walks about the fields with a hooking stick."

He insinuated that her close friendships with women

were Sapphic.

Clare, what is this?

So, this is a bust of Mary Berry,

who was Anne Seymour Damer's great friend

and a respected amateur writer in her own right.

What's rather lovely about it, though, is that on the headband,

she's inscribed their names,

Maria Berry and Anne Seymour Damer.

They seem to have been soul mates together.

They write incredibly charged letters to one another

and they certainly seem to have seen each other

as their main source of support and emotional comfort.

Clearly, there was some passionate attachment between the two of them.

Whether or not it's a sexual attachment, I suppose, who can know?

That's the big question in the 18th century.

And these rumours originally appear in the press in the 1770s,

with scurrilous poems saying how fair Italia's maids

have felt the pressure of her hand, the pressure of delight.

So, they're quite full-on!

But maybe these accusations about her sexuality are more to do with

a deep cultural uncomfortableness with the idea

of a professional woman sculptor.

The scandal around Damer only grew when, in 1789,

her skills put her in the firing line once again.

She accepted a significant commission for the exterior

of the Drury Lane theatre...

a statue of the god Apollo.

The male body in public and ten foot high.

Her Apollo no longer exists

but what remains is the scurrilous cartoon it provoked.

Damer is depicted carving the naked bottom of her Apollo

and wielding her mallet with emasculating force,

while prudish classical figures look on, hiding their genitalia,

worried for their own manhood.

The cartoon was humiliating

but Damer had fought too hard

to be dissuaded by mockery.

She went on to model national hero Admiral Nelson

and even King George III himself.

And the Royal Academy showcased 34 of her works

over three decades.

So Anne Damer stands as one of the few female artists

whose work could actually be seen by the 18th-century general public.

Another one was, of course, Angelica Kauffmann,

who had already achieved her place on the male-dominated gallery walls,

but had ambition that lay way beyond them.

She had a shrewd understanding of the new technologies

and the untapped markets for art they could open up.

A good printmaker herself,

Kauffmann saw the revolutionary power of reproduction.

A single etching or engraving of her work could be printed off

in the hundreds, seen in any print shop window on the high street.

The marketplace for decorative art was also ripe for the taking.

Angelica Kauffmann mass-produced in 3D.

This decorated porcelain

represents the very top end of her merchandising.

These are German, from Meissen,

and this is from Worcester, in England.

Kauffmann struck all sorts of deals allowing her paintings

to be reproduced in prints,

but then transferred onto an array of objects,

from teapots, cups and plates,

to fans, to snuff boxes,

to pieces of furniture, even to commodes.

And in this way, Angelica's imagery reached down to the middle market.

As one printer and engraver said of her,

"The whole world is Angelica mad."

Kauffmann's ease with industrial design

took her art onto the breakfast tables

of the polite and commercial classes

and made her extremely rich.

Manufacturing and trade drove art in new directions,

industry offered fresh possibilities

for women to take their art to the world.

Textiles were the most vivid

and ubiquitous source of colour in 18th-century Europe.

Not everyone could wear patterned silks,

but almost everyone had glimpsed them.

While the wealthy bought embroidered silks in huge amounts

for their grand homes and their wardrobes,

in the industry itself, most women were relegated to the low-paid,

low-status roles - spinning and winding.

The weavers and designers were typically men,

protected by their guilds.

But then, a woman came along whose sheer talent

overcame the prejudices of a male-dominated industry.

She is one of the great unsung heroes of British design,

and she lived and worked here, in Spitalfields in East London.

Her name is Anna Maria Garthwaite.

She defined the English style

and clothed her world in cutting edge design

and brilliant colour.

Garthwaite's moment had come,

because the British silk industry

was being eclipsed by its great rival, France.

The male weavers of Spitalfields

had not found a way to compete convincingly.

I've got here a mere selection

of over 800 watercolour designs by Garthwaite.

Being able to paint flowers in watercolours,

this is a typical female, polite accomplishment in this period.

But to be a designer,

you have to understand how to lay out a design

with mathematical accuracy.

Here, she's laid her designs onto squared paper to aid the weaver.

On top of that, she has to have an understanding

of how a two-dimensional design, like this, is going to look

in a very different material altogether.

Just because something looks good as a watercolour,

it does not follow that it'll look great in textiles.

And there are messages on her designs for the weavers.

This one...

..has reminders of what the colours must be on the flowers.

And this extraordinarily ripe, exotic design has instructions

on the bottom, "The white in the flowers will be brocade."

What's impressive to me about all of this,

is evidence of the way that Garthwaite

used a traditional female talent,

watercolour painting of flowers,

and translated it into an industrial product.

Researching the history of female creativity has its challenges.

In this case, there's a great legacy,

but the woman herself is an enigma.

The very few scraps of evidence about Garthwaite's childhood,

a vicar's daughter in Lincolnshire,

demonstrates some education in amateur art.

Here's a papercut made when she was just 17.

It reveals her flair for working precisely on a minute scale,

sheer draftsmanship, as well as her keen eye for repeating pattern.

When her father died, it seems that Garthwaite was left a small legacy,

which she took along with her talent on a wing and a prayer to London.

Here, Garthwaite set herself up

in the heart of the silk weaving district, in the East End

and got down to work, designing watercolour patterns

for the weavers of Spitalfields, who used them to create

some of the most desirable fabrics of the 1730s and '40s.

I met with textile curator Clare Browne,

to discover how Garthwaite became so prominent in a man's world.

Clare, Garthwaite was commended for introducing

the principles of painting into the loom.

Is that just airy flattery or does it have some technical purchase?

I think to some extent it reflects what a very fine artist she was.

But it also may refer to, for example, a particular technique

that she introduced from the French industry,

a technique called point rentre.

It was a way of feeding lighter and darker shades of colour into

each other, so that you get a sense of a three-dimensional curved form.

And it allows you to have a curve in a petal, or a piece of fruit.

Do you think it was hard for her to break in to silk design?

Curiously, some of her designs have the inscription,

"Sent to London before I came down."

And of course they wouldn't necessarily have needed to say

they were by a woman.

And so, a possibility is that these designs were shown to weavers

or mercers, "Would you like more where this come from?"

And then the weavers or mercers were hooked by this extraordinary

talent and carried on patronising her, even though she was a woman.

That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that,

that a male agent might have acted for her.

It's possible. It was a very male-dominated business.

-The weavers' company was all about men.

-Yes.

It's rather fantastic, then, isn't it,

that one of their most successful designers was a woman?

It entirely, I think, reflects her extraordinary talent.

They knew that they could be confident

that she would produce designs they could sell

to their most important customers and that's the crux of it.

Garthwaite's designs

were not only sported by the fashionable around town.

Thanks to the British dominance of trade,

her fabrics were in demand across Europe and even in America.

Here, a Garthwaite silk is proudly worn by Mrs Charles Willing,

a Philadelphia matron...

a demonstration of how Garthwaite truly dressed the world.

While Garthwaite was revitalising a key British industry,

in Northern France, a young woman was growing up in obscurity.

She would go on to use her imagination to revolutionise

the defining industry of the French.

Her story leads us to the most fabulous court of the 18th century -

that of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

Her name was Rose Bertin.

Now, you may not have heard of her, but she ingeniously built herself

into the world's first celebrity fashion designer.

If it wasn't for Bertin, Dior and Chanel would never have existed.

And Paris might never have become the undisputed capital of fashion.

Yet Bertin's start in life in no way suggested

the glittering possibilities to come.

Born into an artisan family in Picardy,

at nine, Bertin was apprenticed to a dressmaker to learn

the mysteries of a trade for centuries the preserve of men.

In the late 17th century, bands of intrepid seamstresses

broke the male monopoly on dressmaking,

earning the right to cut and construct clothes

for women and children,

establishing their own all-female guilds.

Within a century, the canniest had established themselves

as flourishing businesswomen, not sweated labour,

adept at predicting aesthetic change

and able to capture the Zeitgeist in clothes.

With women now having the right to dress women,

Bertin followed her dream to Paris

and, aged just 16, charmed her way into a chic fashion emporium.

Her inventiveness in trimmings

and her ability to attract noble patrons served her well.

The female proprietor of the shop invited her into partnership.

In 1770,

Bertin got financial backing from an aristocratic client to go solo.

Rose Bertin's shop was on the Rue Saint-Honore.

She called it Le Grand Mogul after a famous diamond,

a title that was glittering with exoticism and exclusivity.

It was made, the exterior, of marble,

faux marble in lemon and lavender.

Inside, it was decorated with portraits

of her royal clients from all across Europe.

Bertin displayed literally hundreds of fully trimmed outfits.

So what was her secret?

I've come to meet designer Fanny Wilk,

who specialises in recreating historical fashions,

to find out just what it was that made Bertin such an innovator.

Fanny, you've modelled for us two different kinds of looks.

And I can see that this is a formal court dress

and this is for more informal, I would think, afternoon wear.

What did Rose Bertin do differently on a dress like this?

What marked her out from her competitors?

She finds new models, she finds new shapes,

new materials, new colours,

new matching between all the accessories and the hat...

It was possible for her to work with dresses like empty canvas.

She put a lot of jewels, trims, laces, feathers,

a lot of things that make the dress much more beautiful.

So, really, she is what we might think of as a stylist,

in the Hollywood sense of a stylist.

Not only dresses but the whole...

Yeah, the tout ensemble.

But Bertin's ambitions lay beyond just fashioning the nobility.

This lowborn artisan had set her eyes on impressing a future queen.

When the young Austrian princess, Marie Antoinette,

arrived in France in 1770, she was accused of being dowdy.

Bertin saw her chance and, through one of her aristocratic clients,

secured an introduction.

From that moment, a new collaboration was born.

Marie Antoinette's dowdy days were behind her.

Fashion and history were set on a new and momentous course.

Shortly after they met, Marie Antoinette invited Rose Bertin

behind the scenes to her own private apartments, and so it was here,

not in the grand formal bedroom,

that they had their biweekly meetings to design her entire look

and to perform the fittings.

Out of those meetings came the unforgettable image

we all know today.

Bertin dressed Marie Antoinette for her husband's coronation.

Not in the traditional ceremonial garb,

but in the contemporary galant style,

covered in whimsical embroidery and sparkling with sapphires.

But it was the towering Bertin pouf,

a raised coiffure quite literally built with scaffolding,

pads and pomade, which truly inflated the Queen's stature,

adding three feet to her height.

A courtier remarked, "To be the most a la mode woman alive,

"seemed to Marie Antoinette the most desirable thing."

The young Queen had become a walking art installation

and the architect of all this, Rose Bertin,

demanded full recognition for her genius.

Challenged by a client's husband about the whopping size of her bill,

Bertin reportedly brushed him off,

comparing herself to a feted male painter,

and querying whether he was only paid

according to the size of his canvas and colours.

If his fee was not based on the price of his materials,

then why should hers be?

Bertin had grasped something that women

striving in a creative field had to learn -

the importance of the right persona.

Was she really that arrogant?

We can never know.

But clearly, she recognised the signal importance

of projecting a memorable personality

and titanic self-belief.

The prototype of the demanding empress

and diva of fashion was born here.

But Bertin's creation also changed the course of economic history.

What makes all this so important is the fact that Marie Antoinette

disposed of her dresses at the end of every season

and got a whole new set.

So what that means is, something akin to the modern fashion cycle

was whirring into life.

Business boomed.

Bertin's designs sped across Europe on the backs of dolls -

or Pandoras, as they were known.

They took prototypes of French fashion to every court,

from Spain to Russia.

Bertin's exuberant confections

fed Marie Antoinette's reputation for extravagance.

But in the end, it was a simple gown

that would surprisingly draw the greatest uproar.

In 1783, Bertin dressed the Queen

in an informal muslin chemise.

It was a sea change in fashion history.

All over Europe, women abandoned their stiff, formal silk dresses

in favour of lighter, less structured clothes

made out of Indian cottons.

But to the French public,

it looked as if the Queen was displaying her underwear.

It was an insult to France itself.

The silk industry was up in arms at the betrayal.

It's at this point that telling Bertin's story

brings me face to face with another female artist

who stamped her style on Europe,

thanks to the patronage of Marie Antoinette.

Her name is Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun.

Bertin may have dressed the Queen,

but it was Lebrun who became the Queen's favourite portrait painter,

displaying the monarch and her style to the world.

Vigee-Lebrun was one of the greatest portrait painters

of her generation.

But for Joshua Reynolds,

she was one of the greatest portrait painters of any generation,

surpassing even van Dyck.

This is just one of at least 30 paintings

she completed of Marie Antoinette.

And it's a beautiful symphony in colour, in grey and pink.

It's also masterful in its depiction of texture,

from the sheen on the grey silk,

the airiness of the lace

and the softness of those feathers.

I feel you can touch them.

But above all, what she's managed to do

is transform a really rather plain queen

into a vision of ravishing, radiant, enchanting prettiness.

From the outset, Vigee-Lebrun had a number of advantages.

She was born in Paris,

the capital of power, taste and fashion.

Her artist father mentored her

and as a teenager she was already painting portraits and had a studio.

In return, she supported the family.

In 1776, aged 20, she wed an art dealer.

She could copy his collection of Old Masters and, naturally,

he shared his contacts with her, opening up a rich seam of clients.

The wife benefitted from the husband's business,

but the husband recognised a talented asset when he saw one.

And one of her assets, she traded on mercilessly.

"In those days, beauty was really an advantage,"

she wrote in her memoirs.

Over her career, she painted 37 self-portraits,

convinced they were her most effective calling card.

Vigee-Lebrun even credited this one with gaining her entry

into the prestigious French Academy, aged 28.

But she was far more than just a pretty face.

She had an inspired ability to read the cultural Zeitgeist.

In late 18th-century France, thanks to Enlightenment philosopher,

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, good parenting was a hot topic.

In the past,

the rich had tended to outsource the raising of their children.

But Rousseau insisted that women should not shirk their natural role.

Vigee-Lebrun cleverly reflected

and shaped these ideals in a sentimental style of portraiture

and she started with herself

and her daughter Julie.

Madonna and child, tender, informal...

but, for me, a bit too saccharine.

She's responding here to Rousseau's call

for a return to the maternal, the dutiful, and the natural

but, rather brilliantly, she's taken the idea of nature

and transformed it into fashion.

But one maternal portrait

challenged Vigee-Lebrun's skills to the maximum.

In 1787, she accepted a daunting commission -

to change the nation's perception of its monarchy.

The task?

To present Marie Antoinette not as a flamboyant queen,

but as a compassionate mother.

With the storm clouds of revolution gathering,

this was fundamentally a political portrait.

The aim of this huge painting

is to save the Queen's reputation.

So, the Queen, by this point,

has already developed a reputation for ostentation, excess,

and there's a lot of criticism of her finances, is there not?

Yes. Absolutely.

Because Marie Antoinette was so much hated,

the intention here is to make her look simple and serious.

This is why you have the jewel casket at the back,

making a reference to a Roman episode.

It's the story of Cornelia, Mother Of The Gracchi.

When asked by a friend to show her jewels,

Cornelia said that her only jewels were her children,

and she presented her children,

which is exactly what Marie Antoinette is doing here.

She's putting forward her children, her three children.

But I think what's also interesting is that it shows that Vigee-Lebrun

can fulfil a very complicated brief.

She really thought about the message that the painting should convey.

But given the bankruptcy of royal finances,

it would take more than a portrait,

however brilliantly executed,

to rescue the reputation of the French Queen,

or for that matter, the two artists who helped create it.

Critics saw these women

as feeding the Queen's taste for ostentatious luxury,

flaunting exquisite excess while the state went bankrupt.

When Revolution erupted in 1789, the mob attacked Versailles

and their immediate target showed just how much the people hated

Rose Bertin.

The tapestries and the paintings went untouched.

Instead, the mob went straight to Marie Antoinette's wardrobe

and tore Bertin's fairy-tale creations to shreds.

Bertin tried to ride out the storm,

presenting herself as a citoyenne,

gamely selling revolutionary cockades.

But her brand was toxic now.

She was too closely associated with the frills of the Ancien Regime.

Business suffered and in 1792, she decamped to London.

Before she fled, however,

she did one last service for her royal client.

In the wake of the King's execution,

she sent Marie Antoinette a mourning outfit.

She wore it day and night for months until her own execution,

by which time it hung on her body in tatters.

Bertin opened a modest shop in London,

hoping to recover her debts, but it came to nothing.

Her moment had passed.

Yet her legacy lives on.

She had established Paris as the capital of haute couture

and not even revolutionaries could take that away.

For Vigee-Lebrun, however,

the outcome of the Revolution was very different.

Bold and ambitious still, she fled Paris for Italy,

achieving a level of international success

in the courts of Italy and Russia,

matched by few men and no other women of the period.

Here in Florence, in the famous Vasari Corridor,

lined with self-portraits by the great artists of Europe,

she is one of only a handful of women

permitted to stake their claim to posterity.

The unrepentant Vigee-Lebrun,

still painting away.

Still with that impossible prettiness

which masks her grim, gritty determination.

And here she is painting Marie Antoinette.

She still allied herself with the Ancien Regime,

and with the woman that made her.

There is a contradiction here.

Marie Antoinette is the ultimate symbol of elitism,

yet she was also an enabler of female talent,

in sharp contrast to what was to come.

While one might have thought a revolution with a credo of liberty,

equality and fraternity would have helped creative women,

that wasn't to be.

The old academy, open to exceptional women,

was replaced by the Institute of France,

that barred women artists altogether.

It is one of the great ironies that the Ancien Regime

was actually more receptive to female creativity than the Republic.

Because revolutionaries, despite their egalitarian rhetoric,

are often invincibly sexist.

The story of women and art

is no simple onward march to formal recognition.

There were setbacks as well as breakthroughs.

Back in England, after Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffmann,

the Royal Academy defaulted to the boys' club

it had always wanted to be.

It would elect no more female members for another hundred years.

But in that century, female artists would emerge

who didn't need the sanction of an art establishment.

In my next programme, women strike out on unique paths

to redefine our idea of art and the role it can play in our lives.