Sofonisba Anguissola

Born around 1532 to a poor noble family in Cremona, Anguissola trained with local painters at a time when women weren't supposed to hold brushes professionally. She travelled to Rome and caught Michelangelo's eye, then Milan, where she painted the Duke of Alba. In 1559 Spain's queen - herself an amateur painter - summoned Anguissola to Madrid as tutor and lady-in-waiting; she became official court painter to Philip II, adapting her intimate family portraits to stiff state commissions. After the queen died, Philip arranged an aristocratic marriage for her, and she moved through Sicily, Pisa, and Genoa, working as a leading portraitist into old age. Her early self-portraits and studies of children remain her sharpest work - close-observed, unstilted. She died in Palermo in 1629, ninety-seven years old, having shown a generation of women that the door could be shouldered open.