The Early Years (at the kitchen table)

Jitske Schols (b. 1969) is a Dutch visual artist based in Amsterdam. She has a background in communications and combines her interest in people and their stories with her love for painting. In her work she focuses on telling lost or untold ‘herstories’ and often works on long-term projects where she thoroughly researches her subjects and in the process is inspired to create paintings that she uses to tell the stories of these women. Works by Schols are included in several corporate and museum collections.

Women have been making significant contributions to science for centuries and receiving little to no credit for their work. Project “Footeprint’ is inspired by the life of Eunice Foote (1819-1888) who discovered the heat-absorbing property of carbon dioxide and water vapor and she described and theorized the gradual warming of the Earth’s atmosphere in 1856 (!). She was the first to demonstrate what today we call the greenhouse effect. Three years later, the well-known Irish physicist John Tyndall published similar results demonstrating the greenhouse effects of certain gases, including carbonic acid. Presently, Tyndall’s work is widely accepted as the foundation of modern climate science, while Foote’s remains in obscurity. The reason? Women were practically excluded from the world of science in the name of their supposed natural inferiority.