What a feeling it must be to prove one’s detractors wrong, and to do so graciously and to public acclaim. When relatively unknown artist Sarah Thompson submitted her painting The Roll Call to the Royal Academy’s (all-male) Hanging Committee in 1874, she did so with apprehension: after all, one of England’s leading art critics, John Ruskin, had always been unwavering in his belief that “no woman could paint.” Sarah Thompson (later Sarah Butler, on marrying) was amazed to hear that not only had The Roll Call been accepted, but that its exhibition at the Royal Academy had caused a sensation: her depiction of exhausted, battle-worn grenadier guards struggling to line up for the roll call after a brutal engagement in the Crimean War had so impressed Queen Victoria that the regent insisted on buying the painting from its commissioner, Manchester industrialist Charles Galloway. The painting was hugely popular with critics and the public alike, though according to Tabitha Barber, Curator of British Art 1550-1750 at Tate Britain, the praise that the artist valued most highly was “from Crimean War veterans, who appreciated the painting’s realism and accuracy.” The following year, Ruskin changed his tune entirely. “I have not seen the like since Turner’s death,” he wrote of Thompson’s gradations of color and shade.
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It is revelations like this that make Tate Britain’s exhibition “Now You See Us: Women........