Born: 1604 (circa), Belgium
Died: 1689
Country most active: Belgium
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
For more than 300 years, Flemish painter Michaelina Wautier’s portraits were credited to male artists such as Jacob Van Oost or were simply forgotten in the storage rooms of museums. Although she was well established during her lifetime in the 1600s—despite women not being allowed to paint or draw by studying live models—she fell into obscurity after her death. It was only through the efforts of art historian Katlijne Van der Stighelen that she gained modern recognition. “If she was not a woman, her works would have been considered in the same breath as art made by the great male contemporaries of the 17th century,” Van der Stighelen says, “such as Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck.”
While trying to convince galleries to display Wautier’s work, Van der Stighelen encountered a catch-22: “Organising an exhibition of an unknown female artist, I was told, would be financially catastrophic for their museums.” Yet exhibitions are one of the main avenues for artists to become better-known. Antwerp’s Museum aan de Stroom finally exhibited Wautier’s works in 2018, followed in 2022 by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Boston curator and director of the museum’s Center for Netherlandish Art, Christopher Atkins, worked with Van der Stighelen on the show, commenting, “I’m a specialist in 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art, and I’d never heard of her until relatively recently.” A key patron, Rose-Marie van Otterloo, noted “I’m from Belgium and I read about Wautier about four years ago … I’d never heard of her. After thirty years of collecting old masters, how could I not have heard of her?”
Frederick Ilchman, the chairman of the Art of Europe department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, expressed the hope that as more women artists like Michaelina Wautier are “rediscovered” and given attention, that more women artists would follow—“we will surely learn more about her and her achievement; there must be other women artists from her era who deserve similar attention.”