10 Women Artists You Need to Know 👀

Discover 10 hidden gems of the art world, including Alma Thomas, Gabriele Münter & Florine Stettheimer. Your next favorite artist is here.

---

---

1 | Gretchen Scherer

Gretchen Scherer paints rooms you’ll never visit because they don’t quite exist. This Brooklyn-based artist meticulously recreates European historical interiors like Burghley House and Sir John Soane’s Museum, but here’s the twist: she composites elements from different rooms and eras, creating dreamlike spaces that feel like memory and imagination colliding.

Her hyperrealistic oil paintings blur the line between documentary and fantasy, making you wonder what’s real.

2 | Elizabeth Shippen Green

Before women could vote, Elizabeth Shippen Green was signing exclusive contracts with Harper’s Magazine. She became the first woman on Harper’s staff in 1901, working alongside the era’s biggest illustrators.

With her friends Violet Oakley and Jessie Willcox Smith, she formed the “Red Rose Girls”: three women artists who lived and worked together, creating some of America’s most iconic children’s book illustrations with Art Nouveau flair and stained-glass brilliance.

3 | Gabriele Münter

Gabriele Münter co-founded Der Blaue Reiter with Kandinsky and Franz Marc, but here’s the real story: she’s the reason we even have those paintings today.

After WWII, she donated over 1,000 works by the Blue Rider artists to the Lenbachhaus, pieces she’d hidden and protected from Nazi destruction. Her own work featured bold Bavarian-inspired colors and simplified forms that defined German Expressionism.

---

---

4 | Harriet Backer

Harriet Backer invented “plein air indoors.” She took Impressionism’s obsession with light and brought it inside Norwegian homes and churches. Her 1883 masterpiece “Blue Interior” captured light so precisely that critics declared “every atom is colour.”

For nearly two decades, she ran an influential painting school in Kristiania, mentoring the next generation of Scandinavian artists while perfecting her luminous, atmospheric interiors.