Quotes from Jennifer Higgie

However, in 1774, when she was nineteen, her materials were confiscated by government authorities. They had caught wind of the young artist's success; it was illegal to work as an artist without guild or academy membership – something that, as a woman, was very difficult to achieve.

The day my daughter was born, I was still in the studio, trying to work on my Venus Binding the Wings of Cupid in the intervals between labour pains.

It can be a site of reverie or rebellion; a form of propaganda or an idiosyncratic way of responding to the world: its openness to what it can be is one of its – if not its greatest – sources of power. It can be a response to anything and made anywhere by anyone: it can give permission to the silenced to speak or create a lexicon for the illiterate; it can lend the world shape and make it graspable to those who feel that it is out of reach.

a display of teeth and a hint of joy or hilarity suggested the subject was 'plebeian, insane (or at least not in rational control) or else in the grip of some particularly powerful passion'.

The fear abounded that once they were allowed into the art schools, who knew where it would end: their demands for equality were understood to be akin to anarchism, socialism, vegetarianism and atheism.

If she had access to a mirror, a palette, an easel and paint, a woman could endlessly reflect on her face, and, by extension, her place in the world.

As psychoanalysis has made so clear, human beings move through life dictated to by a mess of conscious and unconscious memories, acts and feelings. The language of art is a reflection of this: it's one of slippages, ambiguities and contradictions that are communicated via images, which are, by their very nature, indeterminate.

Tassi was eventually found guilty of the rape of a virgin. He was held in prison for eight months and exiled from Rome for five years, but as he was close to the Pope and his nephew, this was never enforced. The trial didn't seem to have affected his career: he was commissioned to paint murals in the Pallavicini-Rospigliosi

in many cultures, mirrors were believed to be magical objects that granted access to supernatural knowledge.

To express your sense of place in the world is, it would seem, an endless act of translation. A self-portrait is not always a depiction of a body.

Everything she did, even paintings without any humans in them, can be read as a variation on a self-portrait – they're all reflections of her inner world, a place of acute sensitivity not only to the people but to the places she came into contact with.

If it is true that this is the first portrait of an artist at work, it could be because she came from the northern tradition which specialized in depictions of St Luke painting the Virgin, and she had the wit to adapt this example of a working artist for herself.

Throughout her life Sofonisba enjoyed teaching and this small drawing could be read as a testament to the joy it gave her.