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It’s a pleasant surprise when “an exhibition of beautiful and moving paintings comes along, pretty much out of the blue, by someone you have never heard of”, said Simon Schama in the Financial Times.
Michaelina Wautier was born in what is now Belgium in around 1614; she was “slightly younger than Rembrandt and older than Vermeer”. We know little about her: she came from a “well-to-do but not aristocratic family” in the Catholic south of the region, then still a possession of Spain. She never married, and she shared a Brussels studio with her brother Charles, also an artist. Wautier also had links to the court elite; several of her paintings ended up in the collection of the governor of the Spanish Netherlands.
There were many “gifted” female artists working at this time, but most were limited to painting flowers. Wautier stood apart, creating everything from self-portraits to religious and mythological scenes; indeed, “there was almost nothing (other than landscape) that [she] didn’t try or couldn’t do”. And as this spectacular show at London’s Royal Academy demonstrates, her “virtuoso talent” puts her right up there “among the highest ranks of 17th century painters”.
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Wautier immediately makes her presence felt, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. The first thing here is a “towering” self-portrait, depicting her sitting at her easel, “oozing confidence, thoughtfulness and class”. Painted around 1650, at the probable height of her career, it “shows off an immediate range of skills”. The likeness is “gripping”: “a fabulous face” that stares past you “as if she has noticed someone more interesting in the room behind”. Her clothes – velvet shawl, white satin dress – are evoked with real care. More importantly, she is proudly picturing herself as an artist, as someone who has escaped domesticity. Wautier is also a superb painter of children: an “extraordinary sequence” depicting five little boys demonstrating the senses is a particular highlight, with one holding a rotten egg to illustrate the sense of smell.
There’s a fashion for “rediscovering” female artists these days, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. But the quality of Wautier’s art is “apparent at first glance”. You need only look at her enormous The “Triumph of Bacchus” (c.1655-59): it depicts “a noisy pagan procession” around the distinctly “flabby” wine god, himself splayed “like a prize marrow” in a wheelbarrow. Satyrs cavort while, to the right, a bare-breasted female figure gazes directly at the viewer; scholars now believe this to be a likeness of the artist herself. It’s the exhibition’s “climax”, and a deft display of the artist’s singular talent. Since our knowledge of Wautier is so “sketchy”, the show is one of “questions as much as answers. For most gallery-goers, though, that won’t matter, because – even incomplete – her story and her art are sufficiently compelling.”
