The presentation departs from a detail – the depiction of a heathen woman – on Derick Baegert’s Calvary Triptich (1477–78) to closely examine the iconography of the ‘Gypsy woman’ firmly looking out onto the viewer. Baegert’s composition presenting this ‘gaze’ is one of the first, followed by similar compositions presenting ‘Gypsy women’ looking directly at the viewer all the way until the nineteenth century… The second case study attempts to reconstruct the life story and influence of the American Roma woman, Fenella Lowell, who arrived in Paris in 1902. She was the model and companion of the French sculptors Antoine Bourdelle and August Rodin before she moved to Budapest with the Hungarian painter, József Rippl-Rónai, to become the model of both Rippl and the famous Hungarian photographer Olga Máté. The third study reviews the portrait drawings of Sinti women (mostly Gaia and Ringila) by the German sculptor Otto Pankok. Pankok was an honorary member of an extended Sinti family near Düsseldorf in the late 1920s, and eventually became their partner and documenter in cultural survival and resistance. The three case studies attempt to identify these three distant, yet similarly significant moments in European art history, to shed light onto moments when Roma women made an impact on European art. It also demonstrates three effective, explicit and scientifically allowable strategies towards writing a more horizontal art history.