{"id":78408,"date":"2022-11-13T06:10:33","date_gmt":"2022-11-13T06:10:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/loopbeatzz.info\/wp\/the-best-female-old-master-youve-never-heard-of-until-now-the-boston-globe\/"},"modified":"2022-11-13T06:10:33","modified_gmt":"2022-11-13T06:10:33","slug":"the-best-female-old-master-youve-never-heard-of-until-now-the-boston-globe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/loopbeatzz.info\/wp\/the-best-female-old-master-youve-never-heard-of-until-now-the-boston-globe\/","title":{"rendered":"The best female Old Master you\u2019ve never heard of. Until now. – The Boston Globe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Five years ago, Antwerp\u2019s Rubens House posted the digital equivalent of a \u201cwanted\u201d poster for a group of missing 17th-century Flemish paintings not seen in more than 40 years. The five works had never been exhibited publicly, surfacing only rarely at auction as they passed through private collections for more than 350 years.<\/span>
\u201cA single black-and-white image of one of the paintings is the only known visual record,\u201d wrote the museum, noting the works last appeared at auction in the mid-1970s. \u201cThere has been no further trace of the five works since then.\u201d<\/span>
Perhaps more mysterious than the missing group of paintings, however, was the artist who created them: Michaelina Wautier, who in recent years has emerged as among the most talented of the so-called female Old Masters \u2014 largely forgotten women artists whose skill is on par with their male counterparts but are only now getting their due.<\/span>
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\u201cWe knew nothing about her,\u201d said Christopher Atkins, director of the Center for Netherlandish Art at the Museum of Fine Arts. \u201cAs a specialist working in the field, I didn\u2019t know she existed.\u201d<\/span>
Now, Wautier and her once-missing series are getting a close-up at the MFA, which on Saturday will open \u201cMichaelina Wautier and \u2018The Five Senses\u2019: Innovation in 17th-Century Flemish Painting\u201d \u2014 the first-ever exhibition dedicated to Wautier\u2019s work in the US.<\/span>
Equally surprising: All the Wautier paintings in the small exhibition come from Boston-area collections, having been discovered in the the past few years.<\/span>
\u201cIt\u2019s really pretty amazing,\u201d said Atkins, describing how art historians have traditionally focused on male artists from the era. \u201cHow did we miss these things as a field for so long?\u201d<\/span>
Wautier might have remained in the shadows were it not for Katlijne Van der Stighelen, an art historian who began researching Wautier after she encountered the artist\u2019s monumental \u201cTriumph of Bacchus<\/a>\u201d in the storage area of Vienna\u2019s Kunsthistorisches Museum.<\/span>
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Wautier, who lived from 1614 to 1689, painted the work at a time when most women artists were confined to more sanitized subject matter \u2014 children, genre scenes, still lifes. But here Wautier portrayed the boozy god surrounded by a rowdy entourage of nearly nude males, slyly inserting herself into the scene, a calm figure who gazes directly at the viewer.<\/span>
\u201cThis is really astonishing, because we do not have another woman who was able to paint such a range of male bodies,\u201d Van der Stighelen said by phone. \u201cHow did she manage to attain this kind of level?\u201d<\/span>
Despite years of research very little is known of Wautier\u2019s life and work. Born to an affluent family in Mons, she never married, eventually moving to Brussels with her brother Charles, who was also a painter. It remains unknown where she received her training. She never joined the guild, and, to date, scholars have attributed fewer than 40 paintings to her.<\/span>
Those paintings, however, display an astonishing range for any artist, including portraits, mythological scenes, history pieces, religious paintings, genre scenes, and, of course, \u201cThe Five Senses.\u201d Her work was clearly admired in its day, said Van der Stighelen: Not only did she paint portraits of several powerful military commanders, but Archduke Leopold Wilhelm held four of her paintings in his collection.<\/span>
Still, many questions remain: How did she gain access to paint such influential men? Where did she train? And though she died in 1689, her last signed painting dates from 1659 \u2014 what did she do in her final three decades?<\/span>
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\u201cIt\u2019s so frustrating that this woman who was so intelligent, creative, and productive didn\u2019t leave more traces,\u201d said Van der Stighelen, who added that Wautier is not mentioned in any books on Flemish art from the time.<\/span>
\u201cThere are references to women artists . . . but they were all in a way minor artists,\u201d she continued. \u201cIt\u2019s very surprising that, let\u2019s say, the best woman artist we had in those days has never been mentioned.\u201d<\/span>
But her obscurity has also led to a swelling of interest as the market for female Old Masters is stronger than ever. A painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, perhaps the most prominent woman painter of the era, set a record price of more than $5 million in 2019. Similarly, a small work by Wautier sold last year for nearly seven times its low estimate of roughly $80,000.<\/span>
\u201cShe\u2019s just become so famous in such a short time that every dealer is looking for paintings by Michaelina,\u201d said Van der Stighelen, who organized the first major retrospective of Wautier\u2019s work<\/a> in 2018. \u201cEvery two weeks I receive an image of a painting said to be by Michaelina in my mailbox, and 95 percent of them have nothing to do with Michaelina.\u201d<\/span>
The other 5 percent can be astonishing: Witness the six paintings that will be on display at the MFA show, which in addition to \u201cThe Five Senses\u201d will feature a recently discovered self-portrait by Wautier.<\/span>
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The large painting \u2014 in which the artist, dressed in pearls at her easel, looks confidently out at the viewer \u2014 <\/b>has hung for years in the home of a private Boston-area collector. The unsigned work was once attributed to Gentileschi, but the owner contacted Van der Stighelen to inquire if it was perhaps by Anna Maria van Schurman, a 17th-century polymath whom Van der Stighelen has also studied extensively.<\/span>
\u201cI couldn\u2019t believe my eyes,\u201d she said. \u201cI immediately thought it was a self-portrait of Michaelina that we can connect to the \u2018Triumph of Bacchus.\u2019\u201d<\/span>
The Netherlandish Center\u2019s Atkins called it \u201cmind-boggling\u201d that the painting has been in Boston all this time, \u201cless than a 20-minute car ride from the museum.\u201d<\/span>
\u201cIt\u2019s bang on,\u201d he said, describing how the portrait has numerous technical similarities to other works by Wautier. \u201cIt\u2019s absolutely correct.\u201d<\/span>
A similar moment of revelation came for Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, Dutch art collectors who along with Susan and Matthew Weatherbie founded the CNA as part of broader transformational gift in 2017<\/a>.<\/span>
The van Otterloos had only recently become aware of Wautier\u2019s work when Rose-Marie received a call from Christie\u2019s auction house, saying the owner of \u201cThe Five Senses\u201d wanted to sell the works in a private transaction.<\/span>
\u201cWhen Eijk came home, I said you have to look at this. It\u2019s a trifecta: a female artist, a Flemish artist, and \u2018The Five Senses\u2019 are all together,\u201d she said. \u201cWe bought it right away.\u201d<\/span>
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The paintings, signed and dated 1650, present the senses through a series of young boys: One examines his hand through a pair of spectacles. Another holds his nose at the smell of a rotten egg. A third plays a recorder, as a fourth bites into a piece of bread. The final boy scratches his head in confusion after cutting his finger with a knife.<\/span>
Wautier\u2019s treatment of the subject differs markedly from earlier compositions, said Atkins, where smell might be shown by sniffing \u201ca rose instead of a rotten egg.\u201d<\/span>
\u201cThere\u2019s a considerable amount of humor,\u201d he said as he observed the painting, which along with the rest of the series has been on view at the museum since it reinstalled its Dutch and Flemish galleries late last year.<\/a><\/span>
The upcoming show, however, will be the second in the CNA\u2019s innovation gallery, which seeks to present new academic research to Boston audiences. Working with art history students at Brown University, curators have paired the six Wautier paintings with treatments of the five senses by other artists including Cornelis Cort and Johannes Gillisz van Vliet.<\/span>
Van Otterloo, who said the paintings \u201cwill definitely go to the MFA,\u201d added that the couple now focuses its collecting habits with an eye toward enhancing the Boston museum\u2019s collection.<\/span>
\u201cWe really bought this sight unseen,\u201d she said, adding the auction house sent them high-resolution images. \u201cI just didn\u2019t want to lose the chance of somebody else getting in there and buying them.\u201d<\/span>
Malcolm Gay can be reached at malcolm.gay@globe.com<\/a>. Follow him on Twitter at @malcolmgay<\/a>.
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Work at Boston Globe Media<\/a><\/p>\n

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Five years ago, Antwerp\u2019s Rubens House posted the digital equivalent of a \u201cwanted\u201d poster for a group of missing 17th-century Flemish paintings not seen in more than 40 years. The five works had never been exhibited publicly, surfacing only rarely at auction as they passed through private collections for more than 350 years.\u201cA single black-and-white […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":78409,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/loopbeatzz.info\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/loopbeatzz.info\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/loopbeatzz.info\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loopbeatzz.info\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loopbeatzz.info\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/loopbeatzz.info\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78408\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loopbeatzz.info\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/loopbeatzz.info\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loopbeatzz.info\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loopbeatzz.info\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}