‘Forgotten’ Belgian baroque female artist honoured in major exhibition in Vienna

The largest exhibition to date of Flemish Baroque painter Michaelina Wautier has been opened by Queen Mathilde of Belgium at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Showing almost all of her surviving works – including paintings never before shown in public – it finally bestows recognition on one of the greatest artists of the 17th century.

Following centuries of oblivion, the renaissance of interest in the Brussels painter over the last few decades represents one of the most important rediscoveries in recent art history, says the museum.

A collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Michaelina Wautier: Painter moves to the UK capital in the spring.

The show includes the monumental The Triumph of Bacchus (pictured above), a meticulous depiction of pagan debauchery. As women were excluded from art classes with nude models, the work was for a long time incorrectly attributed to Rubens’ students or the Italian late-Baroque painter Luca Giordana.

With women artists in the 17th century largely limited to small-scale floral paintings and portraiture due to their lack of a studio, Wautier’s oeuvre is extraordinary for its variety. Spanning intimate portraits, allegories, still lives and vivid history paintings, it exhibits masterful brushwork, boldness and emotional depth. Another highlight of the exhibition is the allegorical series The Five Senses, which is shown in its entirety for the first time in Europe.

The revival of interest in Wauthier’s life and work highlights how women artists have long been overlooked in history. It also upends the traditional male gaze on nude females by showing a woman’s representation of male bodies.

Born in Mons in the south of Belgium in 1604, Wauthier (self-portrait above) lived with her artist brother Charles in Brussels, where she possibly had access to his studio and to drawing male models. She also moved in the intellectual and artistic circles of the Habsburg court that was located in the Belgian capital.

“We hardly have any biographical data, documents, or letters, but we do have her paintings. That is enough to bring one of the most powerful women artists of her age back into the spotlight,” says exhibition curator Gerlinde Gruber.

Wautier and her brother never married. After her death in 1689, some of her work was falsely attributed to her brother and other notable female artists of the period. 

One of the most revelatory aspects is the signatures on her paintings. Unlike the majority of women artists of the day, she signed with her full name Michaelina Wautier as possibly a way of emphasising both her education and her independence. In two of her works, she used the rare signature invenit et fecit – ‘conceived and executed’, which countered the prejudice of the time that women lacked creative imagination, according to the museum.

Many of her works were bought by the Habsburg governor of Brussels and art collector Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, which is why the Vienna museum possesses most of her surviving paintings.

Among the many loans of paintings to the exhibition are works from the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp.

Michaelina Wautier: Painter
Until 22 February
Kunsthistorisches Museum
Vienna

Photos: Queen Mathilde of Belgium ©eSeL.at - Lorenz Seidler; The Triumph of Bacchus ©KHM-Museumsverband; Self-portrait ©Museum of Fine Arts, Boston