Review by Michaelina Wautier – a stunning lost artist emerging from the shadows of her male contemporaries | Art and design

ART History is currently revising the accepted white male canon by revealing overlooked female artists. We have witnessed the recent explosion of interest in the extraordinary work of Artemisia Gentileschi, whom major galleries such as the National Gallery have done their best to extricate from the violent sexual assault that tends to cast a shadow over her CV. By contrast, we have little documentary evidence of her immediate contemporary Michaelina Wautier (c. 1614–1689) other than that she was born in Mons in the Spanish Netherlands (now Belgium) and lived with her artist brother Charles in Brussels near the royal court.

They both share the commonality of being so technically accomplished that – while working in a patriarchal society that prevents women from easily enjoying successful artistic careers – their works have since been automatically misattributed to their male counterparts and thus obscured in art history for 300 years; Artemisia, her father Orazio, and Michaelina, her brother Charles, or other contemporary Baroque painters. Wautier is also elusive in combining several genres, all of which are executed with a consistent quality: portraits, historical or religious paintings, and decorative floral works – more commonly associated with female artists – which preclude identification.

In 2009, a great painting entitled “The Triumph of Bacchus” was presented for the first time as “signed” (i.e. definitively by) Michaelina, at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. This monumental painting appears in the Royal Academy’s presentation of the latest edition of Michaelina’s cutting-edge work. The scope and ambition of the work, combined with tangled swathes of bare anatomical flesh, seemed for generations intolerable as the work of a woman, even though Michaelina painted her face in it: women have historically been denied access to art classes (and thus live models). How could she do it then, so easily?

The exhibition is a rare example of art historical investigation, taking place in real time, that seeks to solve such mysteries using the three pillars of scientific analysis, scholarship and connoisseurship. For example, of the only two known wreath paintings, one is painted on a wooden board inscribed with the sign of Antwerp, giving it a geographical location, but it also contains unusual images of bull skulls, a motif seen on ancient Roman urns. Elsewhere, in the only known drawing by Watier, she examines the Medici bust of Ganymede that was then in Rome. Did she have the financial means to visit Italy, or the social connections to encounter such direct visual references?

The exhibition makes the strongest argument for connoisseurship: identifying artistic authorship through sensing and recognizing a distinguished painter feel. This practice, practiced by experts who have spent their entire careers researching and building incomparable memory banks of images, is not quantifiable – so auction houses and galleries tend to favor the safer conclusions of science and scholarship. But these are nothing without the first.

What really strikes the eye in this arrangement of paintings are the first two of the three galleries displaying religious portraits and paintings interspersed with those of her contemporaries – Rubens and Charles Wautier – and then those deemed “the most outstanding works” in the third gallery, allowing for a purely stylistic comparison used for connoisseurship. It reveals that Michaelina and Charles clearly shared a similar technical education, and perhaps the same studio and materials. In fact, the curators have identified some examples in which Michaelina’s hand may have contributed to her brother’s work.

The business room designed by Michaelina alone is a delight; “Most Unique” is not only for the graphic application that is at once baroque in style and at the same time quintessentially her own (note her particular penchant for unruly, loose locks), but is full of brilliance and verve evoked by her sense of humor. Her Five Senses series turns traditional images on their head: for example, Smell traditionally shows a woman smelling a flower – here, a sullen boy recoils, his nose scorched, from a rotten egg in his hand.

This is likely the first encounter with Michaelina Wautier’s work for a UK audience; Bringing together all of her well-known works, previously nonexistent in the collective imagination, has the strange effect of conjuring up someone entirely new. An amazing ability of exceptional ability and fully formed. It is also important to raise the awareness needed to continue efforts to uncover more misattributed or missing paintings. There is more to this story.