It began with an earthquake (Inge Lehmann)

Henrietta Vansittart, née Lowe (1840-1883) was a British engineer. After the death of her father, she developed his propeller design to patent maturity. Without attending formal school or university, she achieved what her father had previously failed to do: she was awarded a US patent (1868) and numerous other patents for the invention, which saved fuel and thus made shipping more efficient at the time. The technique of this workThe artist mixes oil paint with ink, which forms the basis of this depiction in an experimental process. First, a fine preliminary drawing is made on the canvas with light, thinly applied oil paint. (Some of these contours can be seen below right.) After the underpainting has dried, the canvas is randomly colored with water and ink. This creates surfaces and areas that are not wetted by the ink. In the final step, the artist fills in all the remaining areas with oil paint. About the portrait There is only one documented depiction of Henrietta Vansittart that actually shows her: On a newspaper page, you can see her holding a greatly reduced model of her ship's propeller. The original image is black and white. The artist imagines a color scheme for the engineer's clothing and hair color.

Margaret Crane (*1941 in the USA) is a graphic designer and inventor of the pregnancy test for home use. Her idea and prototype were recognized in 2 patents (1969).However, the home pregnancy test was not successfully launched on the US market until much later (around 1977). Despite its success, Margaret Crane never saw a penny for her patented invention. The painting technique of this work The basis is a white canvas, which was colored with ink in a random process. In the next step, the artist paints the portrait into the resulting areas. The idea behind this type of representation is the fact that women and their contributions are not seen clearly and unambiguously. The portrait series aims to make women like Margaret Crane more visible and thus better known. Who is Margaret Crane? At the age of 26, Crane was hired by the pharmaceutical company Organon in 1967 to work on a new line of cosmetics for the company.When she visited the company's laboratory one day, she noticed a lot of test tubes.She asked curiously, and to her surprise, they were pregnancy tests - for use by doctors. Each test tube contained reagents that, when mixed with the urine of a pregnant woman, indicated pregnancy by forming a red ring at the bottom of the test tube. Inspired by this, Crane saw the possibility of using this as a home pregnancy test.She thought it was so simple that women could perform this test at home without medical supervision, and in a quicker way.Crane had no prior scientific knowledge, but she wanted the pregnancy test to be a private matter for every woman. So Crane took matters into her own hands and began working on her prototype at her home in New York.She designed her first model, which resembled the tests she had observed in her laboratory.Her idea and the prototype were rigorously rejected.Nevertheless, her employer Organon applied for patents on her behalf in 1969, which were accepted.Years later, in 1977, the model proposed by Crane was sold throughout the USA under the name "Predictor". Although her name was on the patents for the device, Organon licensed the product to three over-the-counter pharmaceutical companies, and Crane never received a penny for her design. She had to sign away her rights for a dollar and never saw that dollar. Crane and her partner Ira Sturtevant, who supported Crane in her endeavors, later formed an advertising and design firm called Ponzi & Weill.

Trota de Salerno (~1090-1160) was a physician and gynecologist from Salerno (Italy), where a large community practiced medicine in the 11th century. Trota de Salerno summarized the knowledge about the female body and the treatment of female ailments in a large collection of writings, later known as the "Trotula". This book was the standard work on gynecology for centuries and was distributed throughout Europe. A monk once changed her name to "Trotulus", as he probably thought a female name was a mistake. Later, in the 19th century, a historian wanted to know Trota not as a doctor but as a midwife. The fact that women and their abilities were considered untrustworthy and that they "should actually be men" is not uncommon in historiography, which has been dominated by men right up to the present day. The painting technique of this workThe basis is a white canvas, which was colored with ink in a random process. In the next step, the artist paints the portrait on these colored areas. The idea behind this type of representation is the fact that women and their contributions are not seen clearly and unambiguously. The portrait series aims to make women and their achievements - like Inge Lehmann - more visible and thus better known. About the portrait This portrait is based on the image of Trota de Salerno in a manuscript from the 12th century.It is therefore not a portrait in the usual sense - there are no sources about Trota's appearance. The word "Trotulus" is crossed out on the picture, below which is written: Trota de Salerno - in a medieval calligraphy. Who was Trota de Salerno? Trota de Salerno (also known as Trocta) was a doctor and medical writer in the southern Italian coastal town of Salerno who lived in the first or middle decades of the 12th century. She propagated cleanliness, a balanced diet, exercise and the avoidance of stress - a very modern combination. Her book "De curis mulierum" on women's illnesses was very progressive for the time.Her fame spread as far as France and England in the 12th and 13th centuries.After that, apart from a distorted image of her work that survived in the Trotula treatises, her work fell into oblivion until it was rediscovered in the late 20th century.How did Trota come to write down these texts? The literacy of women in southern Italy at this time is not well documented, which raises the question of why the "De curis mulierum" was written down at all.One scholar, Dr. Monica Green (Professor of Modern Early History, Arizona State University), now suspects that "De curis mulierum" may not have been written down for the benefit of women in Salerno, but for an audience in England who wanted general information about medical practices in distant Salerno. Both England and southern Italy were under Norman rule at this time, and the transfer of southern Italian medical writings to Normandy and especially to England is well documented for this period. The manuscript in which we find the earliest copy of the original version of De curis mulierum (from the early 13th century) appears to have been written in both Italy and England.