I dare say Christine de Pizan (1364–c.1430) would be surprised by her current celebrity: six centuries is a long wait. Now the name of this foundational European feminist writer, working in fifteenth century Paris, seems to crop up everywhere. She was invoked in Zanny Begg’s 2017 video The City of Ladies, which is touring Australian galleries until early 2024, and now on the first page of Jennifer Higgie’s rollicking The Mirror and the Palette. In her medieval bestseller The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), de Pizan wrote: ‘Anyone who wanted could cite plentiful examples of exceptional women in the world today: it’s simply a matter of looking for them.’

Incontrovertible then, but more so now. The Mirror and the Palette draws on changes in historical understanding about art by women over recent decades. Fifty years after the clarion 1971 essay by the American Linda Nochlin, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, The Mirror and the Palette canvasses a topic whose time has come: the book mines that pioneering research to bring women painters to life again. Higgie started as a painter, training in Canberra and Melbourne: her pages sing with affection for that art. Since 1995, she has had a distinguished career in the United Kingdom as a long-time editor for frieze, the contemporary art journal, but also as a curator, fiction writer, screenwriter, and broadcaster. In recent years, Higgie has focused much of her formidable energies on women artists; her podcast Bow Down: Women in Art History (2019–21) is a goldmine of conversations with artists about their antecedents; these include Natalia Goncharova, Agnes Martin (and Australian Sally Smart on Bessie Davidson).

Higgie’s long apprenticeship shows in the sparkling immediacy of her writing. It’s one woman’s perspective, informed and passionate: her personal stake in painting informs the book. In seven thematic chapters, Higgie romps through a mostly chronological account of European-style portrait painting, grouping twenty-three artists into chapters that announce guiding theoretical or historical ideas, such as ‘Alchemy’, ‘Translation’, ‘Naked’. Since easel painting was so successfully exported to Europe’s colonies and trading partners, I appreciate her inclusion of Nora Heysen, Margaret Preston, the New Zealander Rita Angus, the Indian-Hungarian modernist Amrita Sher-Gil, and especially her sympathetic account of the provocative treatment of the Primitive Modern by African American Loïs Mailou Jones.