National Galleries Scotland: Three Women
This month Lucy Askew, Chief Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at National Galleries Scotland gives us an insight into three works by women artists which have been added to the national collection

These three works – Frieda Toranzo Jaegar’s The Disorder of Desire, Caroline Walker’s Theatre and Marie Laurencin’s La Lecture dans un Parc – are very different in terms of their style and approach, but a common feature between them is the representation of people or objects in the world. In each case, the artists could be said to be sharing scenarios that invite the viewer to imagine a story about what they see in the painting.
The Disorder of Desire (2022) by Mexican artist Frieda Toranzo Jaeger (born 1988) takes the form of a still life which turns the conventions of Western art history on its head. The painting expresses Toranzo Jaeger’s interest in creating works unbound from classification, and which reflect her queer, feminist perspective.
The Disorder of Desire (2022) by Frieda Toranzo Jaegar
Botanical imagery featured in Renaissance religious paintings from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and seventeenth century Dutch still life painting. However, in Toranzo Jaeger’s work, the flora has multiple references. She employs Indigenous Mexican women expert in pre-Columbian embroidery techniques, passed from mother to daughter. Their embroidery disrupts the painted surface and is intended to highlight the value of Indigenous traditions and labour, too often overlooked as being the work of women or so-called ‘other, ‘non-Western’ communities.
Caroline Walker’s Theatre (2021) is a collective portrait of NHS staff working during the COVID-19 pandemic. Born in Dunfermline in 1982, Walker is one of today’s leading contemporary painters. Her practice highlights a wide range of female perspectives on contemporary society, particularly scenes capturing the nuance and complexity of women’s working lives.
Theatre (2021) by Caroline Walker. National Galleries of Scotland. Acquired with the generous support of Tia Collection, 2024
Theatre was painted following the artist’s residency at the maternity wing of University College London Hospital. The grand scale of this operating theatre scene captures an intimate moment after a birth by caesarean section. The mother gazes towards her child, their bodies separated by the all-female medical team at work. The baby is being warmed in a Resuscitaire medical device, while the midwives check him over.
In Marie Laurencin’s Reading in the Park (around 1926) we encounter a dream-like, pastoral space in which three women sit together with a lamb and a dove. All these characters are equally engrossed in whatever story is being read. Laurencin’s ethereal, simplified style was distinctively her own and this painting is typical of her use of pastel colours. The artist noted her interest in exploring what she saw as feminine worlds, perhaps in opposition to the heavily male-dominated environment in which she lived and worked.
Despite having been raised in poverty, Laurencin achieved fame within her lifetime as an artist; Reading in the Park was made while she was at the height of her powers. As part of Paris’s literary lesbian community, Laurencin was at the centre of its progressive artistic scene. During her career she also made portraits of significant creative women, including Coco Chanel, and created designs for interiors as well as stage sets and costumes for the theatre.
La Lecture dans un parc (c. 1926), by Marie Laurencin. National Galleries of Scotland. Accepted by HM Government in Lieu of Inheritance Tax from the estate of Elizabeth Morhange and allocated to National Galleries of Scotland
Each of these three artists is significant in the history of art, and in each case, the acquisitions have allowed us to represent these artists’ practices for the first time. In different ways the artists each explore ideas and experiences from a female perspective, and open up different narratives about what it is to be a woman in the world.
For over ten years we have been proactive in acquiring works by women artists for the National Galleries of Scotland’s modern and contemporary collection, which spans roughly from 1900 to the present day. At that point only around 12% of works within this part of the collection were by women artists and we recognised that we had work to do to change this, to reflect the important role of women artists in the history of twentieth and twenty-first century art.
It has been exciting and positive in the intervening decade to see how this has resulted in a wide number of important acquisitions of artworks by women artists, and we are also now increasingly taking an intersectional approach. It is important to us that we are able to have works in the collection that represent a range of histories and backgrounds and allow all of our visitors to feel they are represented within their collection.
Frieda Toranzo Jaegar’s The Disorder of Desire, Caroline Walker’s Theatre and Marie Laurencin’s La Lecture dans un Parc are on display and free to visit in National Galleries Scotland’s Modern, National and Portrait galleries
To find out more visit www.nationalgalleries.org