Why have many female artists like Ella Du Cane disappeared from art history?
Ella Du Cane’s watercolor illustrations were extremely popular in the early 20th century through the illustrated travel books of A&C Black. Her images of Venice, Japan, Egypt, and the Alps reached a broad audience and clearly shaped how many readers imagined those places.
Her work didn’t just circulate in books, but was also reproduced on decorative objects such as silver enamel boxes and published as postcards, showing how widely recognizable her work had become at the time. Some of the reproductions of work by Ella Du Cane and other forgotten female artists on silver boxes, have now been highlighted in "Silver Enamel Boxes; A Time Capsule", which documents connections between enamelwork and popular visual culture around 1900.
Despite this level of visibility, she is now only rarely mentioned in broader art-historical discussions. Was it her work overlooked because of the category it fell into — somewhere between illustration, publishing, decoration, and fine art? Or was it simply that later in the 20th century, her work was underrated because she was a woman?