Great C17th women artists: Antwerp-Amst

Old masters too’: Ghent exhibition celebrates female artists of the baroque. Show in part a rediscovery of 40+ mostly forgotten women who plied their trade in the Low Countries

Judith Leyster, a Dutch golden age artist, was about 21 when she painted her self-portrait in 1630. In the picture she presented to the world, Leyster exuded sunny confidence. Clad in shimmering silks and a stiffly starched lace collar, she leant back in her chair, holding palette and brushes, a painting by her side. This work, completed in the year she was admitted to a painters’ guild in Haarlem, proclaimed her arrival as an established artist. It was one of the first self-portraits by an artist in the Dutch republic, a device most male painters did not adopt until years later.

Boy and a Girl with a Cat and an Eel, 1635

by Judith Leyster

While celebrated in her lifetime, Leyster was quickly forgotten after her death. A posthumous inventory attributed some of her paintings to the wife of the deceased, referring to her artist husband, Jan Miense Molenaer. Then she disappeared. Her works were attributed to Frans Hals, other male contemporaries, or simply unknown master. Those paintings under her name were little esteemed. In the 1970s a major US museum sold one; other institutions left her work unseen in their vaults. Now the painter, enjoying a revival, is back in the spot-light. She's one of 40+ female artists who worked in the Low Countries in the baroque period featured in this new exhibition

Unforgettable: Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam 1600-1750 opened Mar 2026 at Ghent Museum of Fine Arts/MSK, after the earlier Washington DC exhibition. The MSK exhibition seeks to restore women to one of the most feted eras of art history, best known for works by Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer and Anthony van Dyck. As MSK puts it in its slogan: Old masters were women too.

Curator Frederica Van Dam said the exhibition asked visitors to reflect on “why haven’t we seen many artworks by women before?” The catalogue mentioned 179 women who were active in the art economy of the Low Countries, which corresponded to the modern-day Netherlands, and Flanders in northern Belgium. Many of them were admired in their lifetimes. Still-life paintings by Maria van Oosterwijck, for example, adorned palace walls throughout Europe. 

Still Life with Flowers in a Decorative Vase

Maria van Oosterwijck c1673

In 1697 Russian Tsar Peter I visited the Amsterdam home of Johanna Koerten, a woman who specialised in paper-cutting art on paper, a craft blending drawing, calligraphy and sculpture. Koerten was paid handsomely for her talents: a work of woven silk in a rustic manner made for the Holy Roman Empress was said to earn her more than twice what Rembrandt made for The Night Watch.

 

Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria,

c1616, National Gall London

Women were written out of the story in the C19th when art history became a discipline. Art historians, who were mainly men, decided what was good art and what was worth writing about. When women did have a walk-on role, they were deemed imitators. That fate befell Rachel Ruysch. Although collectors had long sought her floral stilllifes, admired for their great attention to detail and refined brushstrokes, scholars dismissed her work as derivative. I have seen all her stilllifes, but this self portrait is sublime.

The exhibition is part of growing rediscovery of women who were long absent from art history records, from Italian baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1654) and her near contemporary of Southern Netherlands, Michaelina Wautier, to the Belgian modernist Marthe Donas.

Two Girls as Saint Agnes and Saint Dorothea,

Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp. c1650

 

The C19th was also when painting became the apex of the art museum, over-shadowing the applied arts that women excelled at, such as paper-cutting, calligraphy and lace-making. In the early modern era, lace commanded very high prices, although poorer women, nuns and orphaned girls who usually made the exquisite fans, veils, aprons and tableware earned a pittance. These artists remained anonymous in their lifetimes, signing contemporary records with an “X”.

While many female artists will remain lost to history, some are being re-discovered. The painter Catrina Tieling had been almost entirely forgotten until 2025, when a Dutch art historian reexamined works long attributed to her brother, Lodewijk, and concluded they were in fact signed CT. The exhibition shows Catrina Tieling’s rustic scene of two shepherdesses resting beside a herd of cows, a rare example of an Italianate landscape by a woman.

It also charts some women’s life-changing and unusual decisions. Louise Hollandine converted to Catholicism and entered a convent to maintain her artistic freedom. The daughter of exiled royalty, Hollandine had a gilded childhood in The Hague, becoming a talented portrait painter of friends and family. But she fled her comfortable princess life in 1657 to become a French Benedictine nun, rather than marry her nephew, as her fa-mily wanted. At the convent, she switched to religious genre scenes, although many did not survive the French Revolution. The exhibition shows self-portraits of Hollandine in both lives. In the first, she was cool and poised, fancy in rich silks and a big beribboned hat; in a lat-er work, she made an austere impression, wearing a cross and dressed in a black and white nun’s habit.

Van Dam said art literature needs to see more research into female art-ists and efforts to make their work accessible. Through this exhibition a clear expression of how valuable the works were for the artistic community; it recovered the history of a largely forgotten creative economy in the C17th, when women were vital participants.

Ghent Museum of Fine Arts/MSK

CODART

On 21-22nd May MSK Ghent and the University of Antwerp is running a two-day symposium together with the exhibition Unforgettable. Women artists from Antwerp-Amsterdam The symposium unites art historians, museum professionals and art market experts, sharing their insights on 5 themes: identity, choices, networks, legacy and technique.