Michaelina Wautier review – an astounding lost artist steps out of her male contemporaries’ shadows
Wautier’s mighty paintings have been misattributed to her male peers for 300 years, but now UK audiences can enjoy their first encounter with a 17th-century trailblazer
Art history is currently in the process of revising the accepted white male canon by uncovering overlooked female artists. We have had the recent explosion in interest of the extraordinary work of Artemisia Gentileschi, of whom major exhibitions such as the National Gallery’s have been at pains to extricate from the violent sexual assault that tends to overshadow her biography. By contrast, we have scant documentary evidence of her direct contemporary Michaelina Wautier (about 1614–1689) other than that she was born in Mons in the Spanish Netherlands (present day Belgium) and lived with her artist brother Charles in Brussels near the royal court.
Both share the commonality of being so technically accomplished – while operating in a patriarchal society that prevented women easily enjoying successful artistic careers – that their work has since automatically been misattributed to their male counterparts and thus obfuscated in art history for 300 years; for Artemisia her father Orazio, and Michaelina her brother Charles or other contemporary baroque painters. Wautier is also elusive in straddling several genres, all executed with consistent quality: portraits, history or religious painting, and decorative floral work – the latter more commonly associated with female artists – further preventing identification.
In 2009 a mighty painting, The Triumph of Bacchus, was first presented as “autograph” (ie definitively by) Michaelina, at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. That monumental canvas appears at the Royal Academy’s presentation of the latest iteration of Michaelina’s evolving oeuvre. Its scale and ambition, combined with intertwined swathes of nude anatomical flesh, seemed to generations improbable as the work of a woman, despite Michaelina painting her own face in it: women were historically denied access to art classes (and therefore live models). How could she have done it then, and so effortlessly?
The exhibition is a rare example of an art historical investigation, in process in real time, seeking to solve such mysteries using the three pillars of scientific analysis, scholarship and connoisseurship. Of only two known garland paintings, for example, one was painted on a wood panel embossed with an Antwerp mark, giving it geographical location, but it also contains unusual imagery of ox skulls, a motif seen on ancient Roman urns. Elsewhere, in Wautier’s only known drawing, she studies the Medici Ganymede bust which was then in Rome. Had she the financial means to visit Italy, or the social connections to encounter such visual references secondhand?
The exhibition makes the most powerful case for connoisseurship: the identification of artistic authorship by sensing and recognising a characteristic painterly feel. Practised by experts who have spent their entire careers simply looking and building up incomparable memory banks of imagery, it nonetheless is unquantifiable – so auction houses and galleries tend to favour the safer conclusions of science and scholarship. These are, however, nothing without the former.
What is truly remarkable in this arrangement of paintings is the first two of three galleries showing portraits and religious paintings interspersed with those of her contemporaries – Rubens and Charles Wautier – and then those deemed her “most distinctive works” in the third, allowing for purely stylistic comparison used in connoisseurship. It reveals that Michaelina and Charles clearly shared a similar technical education, perhaps the same studio and materials. Indeed, the curators identify some examples where Michaelina’s hand may have contributed to her brother’s work.
The room of works solely by Michaelina is a joy; “most distinct” not only for a painterly application that is simultaneously baroque in style while also quintessentially her own (note her particular fondness for wild and loose locks), but full of luminosity and vivacity piqued by a sense of humour. Her Five Senses series upends traditional depictions: for example, Smell would conventionally show a woman sniffing a flower – here, a grimacing boy is recoiling, nose scrunched, from a rotten egg in his hand.
This will probably be the first encounter with Michaelina Wautier’s work for UK audiences; grouping all her known works together, having been previously practically nonexistent in the collective imagination, has the uncanny effect of conjuring an entirely new person. An astonishing one of exceptional, fully formed ability. It also importantly raises the awareness required to continue efforts to uncover further misattributed or lost paintings. There is more to come in this story.