If you were to type Michaelina Wautier into the web, the results wouldn’t amount to much. You’d learn she was a painter living and working in Brussels. That she died in 1689 at the age of 75 (pretty good going, given 17th-century Europe’s fondness for endemic infections). And that, since then, she has been largely forgotten. For much of the intervening time, few art historians believed that paintings bearing her signature could possibly have been made by a woman, instead attributing them to her brother or other male artists.
Her altarpiece-sized religious paintings were assumed to be too ambitious for a woman, while nudes posed another problem: how was she meant to accurately paint the human body – let alone the male nude – when the academies that taught such things barred her from entering? You begin to see why Wautier’s authorship was doubted for so long.
And yet she did it all: flowers and still lifes, portraits and large-scale history paintings. Twenty-five of them are now on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, in the first UK exhibition devoted to the artist. Her works are shown alongside those of better-known contemporaries - Peter Paul Rubens and David Teniers the Younger - as well paintings by her older brother, Charles Wautier, who she is thought to have shared a studio with.
Like someone laying out every qualification in a job interview, she throws everything she can into the canvas
You only have to stand in front of Wautier’s flower paintings to see why she moved onto the ‘trickier’ stuff so quickly. The two on view are exquisite, their petals so delicate, they seem moments away from wilting out of the frame and onto the Royal Academy’s floor. But it is in the portraits that the exhibition makes its strongest point: children painted with real tenderness, textiles so real you could reach out and put them on yourself.
The painting that sparked the modern rediscovery of Wautier’s work is here too. ‘The Triumph of Bacchus’ (1650–56), found in storage at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna – which has helped organise this exhibition – set that process in motion. However Wautier, in a sense, had already provided the answer to her doubters. She painted herself into the scene, standing tall among the revellers and meeting our gaze – as if to say: yes, look at me, I can paint like this too. It’s large (in fact, her largest) and busy. Like someone laying out every qualification in a job interview, she throws everything she can into the canvas. Bodies of every kind – some fat, some old, some trim – crowd the canvas, draped in silks and vines and billy goats, around Bacchus, who reclines, lush and thick with flesh, swathed in leopard hide.
Type ‘The Triumph of Bacchus’ into Google, and you’ll likely be shown the painting by Diego Velázquez in the Museo Nacional del Prado, the more famous version for 300 years. But after standing in front of Wautier's mighty painting, it’s safe to say he’s got some (not so fresh) competition.
