For centuries in Western art, depictions of the artist’s studio—by artists from Courbet to Matisse to Wolfgang Tillmans—have shown it largely as a masculine environment. But as epitomized in such paintings as Night Studio (2009) by Nicole Eisenman and The Artist in Her Studio (1994) by Paula Rego, it has long been both a testing ground and a sanctuary for women artists as well.
For the 18 female artists considered below, including painters, sculptors, photographers, designers, and architects, their studios were also their homes. And luckily for us, these imaginative spaces—from Maud Lewis’s cottage in Nova Scotia, covered inside and out with painted flowers, leaves, and birds, to Georgia O’Keeffe’s sparsely furnished house and studio in New Mexico—are open to the public.
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Frida Kahlo Museum, Mexico City
Image Credit: Universal Images Group via Getty Images The easel that Nelson Rockefeller gifted to Frida Kahlo still stands in her light-filled studio at Casa Azul—the artist’s nickname for the childhood home that she returned to as an adult and shared (sometimes) with Diego Rivera. Kahlo’s pigments are behind the easel, and throughout the home visitors can see her photos, personal objects, wardrobe, and even her mole recipe, painting a picture of the artist’s day-to-day life. Original paintings by Kahlo are also on view, including her Viva la Vida (1954), a still life of watermelons, believed to be her final work. The painter and Rivera jointly decided to bequeath the house as a public museum, and it was inaugurated in 1958, just four years after her death. Kahlo remains in the house; an urn containing her ashes resides in her bedroom.
https://www.museofridakahlo.org -
Georgia O’Keeffe Home and Studio, Abiquiú, New Mexico
Image Credit: Photo by Krysta Jabczenski. Copyright © Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. When Georgia O’Keeffe bought an 18th-century adobe home in the village of Abiquiú in 1945, it needed a lot of work. She spent the next four years restoring the house, which has large-paned windows framing panoramic views that resemble her own modernist desertscapes. Now designated a National Historic Landmark, the home and studio offer a snapshot of O’Keeffe’s life there between 1949 and 1984 (two years before her death), including her midcentury modern furniture and collection of bones. The Abiquiú museum complements the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in downtown Santa Fe, which holds the largest collection of the artist’s work in the world. A little over an hour’s drive from Santa Fe, in Taos, the O’Keeffe Room in the Mabel Dodge Luhan House (an inn where the artist stayed when visiting collector Dodge) is available for overnight stays.
https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/homes/ -
Ticho House, Jerusalem
Image Credit: Photo by Elie Posner. Copyright © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Anna Ticho is known for her landscapes of Jerusalem and the surrounding Judean Hills. She and her husband, Avraham, moved from Vienna to Jerusalem in 1912 and around a decade later settled into their stone home in the center of the city, now open to the public as a museum managed by the Israel Museum. In Ticho’s lifetime the address was known for housing a ground-floor eye clinic where Avraham, an ophthalmologist, received patients. But ever since Anna bequeathed the house and its artworks to the city of Jerusalem (she died in 1980), it is her pencil, ink, charcoal, and pen landscapes that draw visitors to the site.
https://www.imj.org.il/en/wings/arts/ticho-house -
Farleys House & Gallery, East Sussex, UK
Image Credit: Photo by Tony Tree. Copyright © Lee Miller Archives, England, 2022. All rights reserved. The unimposing exterior of Farleys House—the country home in East Sussex where former art and fashion photographer Lee Miller and her husband, Roland Penrose, settled after World War II—doesn’t hint at the impressive modern art collection inside or the bohemian guests (such as Picasso, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, and Man Ray) who once weekended there. Miller led a quieter life after spending the war as a photojournalist, documenting the London Blitz as well as the newly liberated concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau, but her coterie of avant-garde friends still came around regularly. She’d prepare suitably surreal dishes for them, such as Green Chicken and Cauliflower Breasts, using vegetables and herbs that she cultivated in the gardens surrounding the house. In homage to Miller’s final career as an award-winning chef, the museum (actively managed by her son and granddaughter) hosts an annual summertime Surrealist Picnic, while its Lee Miller Gallery presents regular exhibitions of Miller’s work.
https://www.farleyshouseandgallery.co.uk/ -
Charleston Trust, East Sussex, UK
Image Credit: Photo by Lee Robbins. Copyright © The Charleston Trust, UK. Bloomsbury Set artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, along with Grant’s lover, David Garnett, had good reason for moving from London to Charleston Farmhouse in 1916: Doing farm work was a way for Grant and Garnett to avoid the draft during World War I. Right away (and when not farming), Bell and Grant made Charleston their own, painting almost every surface of the farmhouse interior down to the doors, doorframes, moldings, and fireplace. Their colorful house became both a rural hangout for artists and an evolving artwork in and of itself. The home contains the studio that Bell and Grant shared until 1939 and the studio she created for herself later, in the attic. Bell lived at Charleston until her death in 1961. Among the items on display is a set of 50 hand-painted dinner plates depicting famous women from antiquity to the 20th century, which art historian Kenneth Clark commissioned Bell and Grant to make in the early 1930s.
https://www.charleston.org.uk/event/house-visit/ -
Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, Cornwall, UK
Image Credit: Photo by Rikard Österlund. Copyright © Bowness. Many of the abstract bronze sculptures at the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden still sit where Hepworth originally placed them when she was living and working there between 1949 and 1975 (the year she died in a fire at her studio). Now owned and managed by the Tate, following Hepworth’s wishes that her home be turned into a museum, it contains more than 30 sculptures and is the largest collection of Hepworth’s work on public display. The upper floor was used for lighter materials, like plaster, and the ground floor supported hefty marble and stone for carving. Hepworth described her beloved studio space as “a sort of magic.”
https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-st-ives/barbara-hepworth-museum-and-sculpture-garden -
Dimbola Museum & Galleries, Isle of Wight, UK
Image Credit: Photo courtesy of Dimbola Museum & Galleries. By the time early British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) was gifted her first box camera—by her daughter and son-in-law on the occasion of her 48th birthday—Cameron was already living at Dimbola, on the Isle of Wight. Using this camera, and working in an old “fowl house” that she converted into her studio, Cameron created evocative portraits of illustrious friends such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Lord Tennyson and used acquaintances and servants as models for allegorical images based on literary and religious works. Saved from threat of demolition in 1993 by a volunteer group that rallied to purchase Dimbola, turn it into a museum, and develop collections, Dimbola Museum & Galleries displays a re-created version of the photographer’s bedroom, a selection of her photographs, and temporary photography exhibitions.
https://www.dimbola.co.uk/ -
Château de Rosa Bonheur, Thomery, France
Image Credit: Photo copyright © Ouiflash. Courtesy of Château de Rosa Bonheur. After animal painter Rosa Bonheur sold her monumental depiction of a Parisian horse market— The Horse Fair (1852–55), now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—she had the funds to buy a 17th-century château near Fontainebleau and make it her permanent home and studio. In the atelier that she built for herself with impressive 20-foot walls and floor-to-ceiling windows, she kept her palettes, brushes, and smock and a rug made from the skin of her pet lioness, Fathma. Elsewhere she kept taxidermied animals and live monkeys, horses, sheep, and tigers. Bonheur bequeathed the château and its contents to her companion, Anna Klumpke, upon her death in 1899; Klumpke used the home until her own death in 1942, and it passed down through her family until 2017. The home was then purchased by a local French woman who operates it as a museum and research center.
https://www.chateau-rosa-bonheur.fr/en/ -
Suzanne Valadon’s studio at the Musée de Montmartre, Paris
Image Credit: Universal Images Group via Getty Images Suzanne Valadon lived at 12 Rue Cortot on two separate occasions: first in 1898 and then again from 1912 onward, after she moved in with her 29-year-old son, Maurice Utrillo, and her romantic partner, André Utter. This trio of painters were far from the only creatives living in the charming 17th-century building behind Montmartre’s Sacré-Coeur; at different points around the turn of the 20th century it attracted artists such as Pierre-August Renoir, Émile Bernard, and Raoul Dufy. The studio where Valadon painted her female figures and portraits of women has been recreated from historic photographs and correspondence as a permanent display at the Musée de Montmartre, established on site in 1960. Valadon’s studio opened to the public in 2014, and though most of its contents are recreated, it does contain the original paneling in Utrillo’s bedroom.
https://fondation-montmartre.fr/the-studio-apartment/?lang=en -
Dora Maar House, Ménerbes, France
Image Credit: Photo Courtesy of Dora Maar House. None of the rooms in Dora Maar’s Provençal house look like they did when the artist was living there, mainly because preserving the state of squalor she sustained would have made the 18th-century townhouse completely unusable by anyone else. When Aube Breton visited Maar there with her mother, surrealist painter Jacqueline Lamba, for example, she remembered scorpions dropping into Maar’s bed. Today a collection of photographs meticulously documents what the home looked like after the 50 summers that Maar spent there, beginning in 1944 when Picasso bought it for her, but the house itself has been refurbished to be livable for an annual artist residency program now hosted there. The house contains 20 paintings, photographs, and drawings by Maar, and these can be seen either in the ground-floor gallery, La Mob, that opened in June 2021 or scattered throughout the house (which can be visited only by booking a guided tour in advance).
https://maisondoramaar.org/maison-dora-maar/ -
Alice Austen House Museum, Staten Island, New York
Image Credit: Photo courtesy of Alice Austen House. In a second-floor closet that Alice Austen converted into a darkroom, the Victorian-era photographer developed the nearly 8,000 images that she took of a changing New York at the turn of the 20th century. Nicknamed Clear Comfort and bought by Austen’s family in the 1840s, the Staten Island house was built in 1690 as a Dutch farmhouse and is now a museum preserving the legacy of this early American photographer. It was Austen’s photographs of the home she grew up in and occupied between 1917 and 1945 with her partner, Gertrude Tate, that made it possible to meticulously restore the exterior and interior, including the ground-floor parlor. Today the museum hosts changing exhibitions of Austen’s work and that of other photographers.
https://aliceausten.org/triennial/ -
Lee Krasner at Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, New York
Image Credit: Photo: John Griffin/Stony Brook University. Courtesy of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center. When Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock moved into this modest fisherman’s home in 1945, just two weeks after getting married, it had no indoor plumbing or central heating; while her husband worked in the barn, Krasner used the back parlor as her studio. Eventually the couple added modern comforts like toilets and took down interior walls to create the sort of open, lofted feel that characterized their friends’ studios in Manhattan. The Abstract Expressionist duo lived here together for barely a decade; after Pollock’s death it was Krasner’s alone. She took over his more spacious barn studio, leaving marks from her gestural paintings on the white walls. Krasner created the Pollock–Krasner House and Study Center in the terms of her will, which opened to the public in 1988 with all the furniture and objects that the home had contained at the time of her death in 1984.
https://www.stonybrook.edu/pkhouse/ -
Elisabet Ney Museum, Austin
Image Credit: Photo courtesy of the Elisabet Ney Museum. German sculptor Elisabet Ney moved to the United States in 1871 and eventually ended up in Texas. There she built a home, which she named Formosa, to accommodate her sculpture practice. Back in Germany she had created portrait busts and statues of notables such as King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Giuseppe Garibaldi, and in Texas she continued to receive important commissions, such as creating monumental figures of state heroes for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and sculptures for the Texas State Capitol. When not working, Ney hosted salons at Formosa. In 1911, four years after her death, her friends joined efforts to turn the artist’s house into the Elisabet Ney Museum—which now houses the largest collection of her work worldwide.
https://www.theney.org/ -
Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town, South Africa
Image Credit: Photo by Sean Wilson. South African painter Irma Stern’s smock and rags are still in her home studio, kept just as they were when she lived there between 1927 and 1966. Stern settled into her Cape Town home, called The Firs, after studying art in Weimar, Germany, and in Berlin, where she had her first solo exhibition in 1916 with the support of Expressionist Max Pechstein. Back home, it took some time for her painted portraits in bold, expressive colors to receive acclaim, but by the 1950s the works from her studio began entering major institutional South African collections. The Irma Stern Museum, opened to the public in 1972, displays the artist’s artworks along with her collection of ancient Egyptian and Greek objects, Indian stone carvings, Chinese ceramics, antique European furniture, and African art.
https://irmasternmuseum.co.za/ -
Villa E-1027, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France
Image Credit: Andia/Universal Images Group via Getty Images. E-1027 might sounds like a coolly mechanical name for a villa on France’s Mediterranean coast, but it is essentially a personal code: E stands for Eileen, 10 represents the tenth letter of the alphabet (J for Jean), 2 is for B (Badovici) and 7 is for G (Gray). In sum, Villa E-1027 is the modernist home that designer and architect Eileen Gray built from the ground up with her partner, architect Jean Badovici, and filled with her own custom furnishings. Completed in 1929, this was Gray’s earliest architectural project. Today, after an extensive restoration, it contains reconstructions of all the original furnishings based on photographs and Gray’s drawings. Gray and Badovici split up shortly after E-1027 was completed, and she left in 1932, moving to nearby Menton to build a house of her own called Tempe à Pailla.
https://capmoderne.com/en/lieu/la-villa-e-1027/ -
Dorich House, London
Image Credit: Photo by Ellie Laycock. Copyright © Dorich House Museum/Ellie Laycock. Studio homes designed by a woman artist to accommodate her own creative work are rare, and this is one of them. Sculptor Dora Gordine designed Dorich House (a fusion of her name with that of her husband, Richard) to include reinforced concrete slab floors strong enough to support her heavy bronze sculptures. She also decided to devote most of the home’s space to her studio and a gallery for showing her work. Completed in 1936, the three-story house that is now a museum dedicated to her work includes many original features, including the built-in sculpture hoist that Gordine used to move pieces between her plaster studio and modeling studio. The entire house is publicly accessible, including the couple’s apartment on the top floor and a roof terrace overlooking London’s Richmond Park.
https://www.dorichhousemuseum.org.uk/ -
Melrose Plantation, Melrose, Louisiana
Image Credit: Photo by Carolyn Ramsey. Clementine Hunter moved to the Melrose Plantation as a girl and never left. At first she worked as a field hand, but by the 1920s she was cooking for the plantation owner, Cammie Henry, who had turned Melrose into a meeting place for artists and craftspeople. Finding some discarded paint tubes left behind by a visiting artist, Hunter took them back to her wood cabin on the grounds, where she began painting scenes illustrating her experience of plantation life. Hunter’s best-known work, the African House Murals (1955), is installed at the African House at Melrose Plantation, which now operates as a historic museum. The artist’s own cabin, where Hunter painted at night by kerosene lantern, has been restored and can be visited. It is a rare example of a laborer’s home on a plantation, where usually only the mansions remain.
http://www.melroseplantation.org/history -
Maud Lewis House at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Nova Scotia
Image Credit: Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images The 12-foot-square house that Canadian artist Maud Lewis lived in for 40 years with her husband, fisherman Everett Lewis, had no electricity or running water, but it was overflowing with color. The self-taught Lewis painted on every possible surface, from the interior and exterior walls down to the dustpan, bread box, and cast-iron stove. Though she also created standard-format paintings (which she sold at modest prices, for income), many consider her painted house to be her masterpiece. After the Lewises died, she in 1970 and he in 1979, their small house by the side of the road lay empty for years Concerned people in the area lobbied to save it, and ultimately the Government of Nova Scotia bought the house so it could be restored and permanently displayed at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, where it has been on view since 1998.
https://artgalleryofnovascotia.ca/blog-category/maud