Meet the Forgotten Women of the Flemish Golden Age

“Unforgettable” at MSK Ghent Reframes Women’s Art in the 17th Century, From Court Painters to Anonymous Lacemakers

What does it take for a woman’s work to survive history when the rules of class, marriage, and money are designed to make her disappear? That question sits quietly beneath “Unforgettable,” a new exhibition at MSK Ghent that brings together paintings, self-portraits, and applied arts to map the uneven terrain women navigated in the 17th century.

Rather than presenting a single heroic narrative, the show traces how social position shaped what was possible. For some, privilege offered training and access, but also imposed strict expectations. For others, talent had to contend with the blunt realities of labor and anonymity. The result is an exhibition that treats women’s artistic production not as an exception, but as a spectrum — from courtly portraiture to the painstaking craftwork that underwrote Europe’s luxury economy.

Among the most striking inclusions are three self-portraits by Louise Hollandine (Dutch, 1622–1709), a princess born in The Hague. One self-portrait, dated to around 1650, is being shown publicly for the first time. Hollandine’s early practice was encouraged within her family circle, where relatives often served as sitters. Yet the exhibition underscores a paradox: the very court environment that enabled her to paint also made a professional career — producing and selling art seriously — incompatible with her role.

In 1657, Hollandine left court life in secret, converted to Catholicism, and entered a prestigious abbey in France, where she later became an abbess. Her reasons for remaking her life remain unknown, but the move offered something rare: the freedom to continue painting outside the constraints of dynastic expectation.

If Hollandine’s story reveals the limits of elite life, the exhibition also examines how middle-class women artists were often tethered to male relatives — and how the market could literally rewrite authorship. Maria Schalcken (Dutch, 1645–after 1699) trained in a technically demanding, illusionistic manner alongside her brother Godefridus Schalcken, who had studied with Gerrit Dou, a pupil of Rembrandt. Evidence on at least two paintings, including a self-portrait, suggests Maria’s signature was altered at some point to make the works appear to be by her brother, a change that would have increased their market value. The show positions this kind of intentional erasure as one reason so many women artists slipped from view.

“Unforgettable” widens its lens beyond painting to include the applied arts — a curatorial decision that sharpens the exhibition’s social argument. An installation of lace by anonymous makers highlights the gendered economics of craft: lacemaking demanded extraordinary time and precision, was poorly paid, and was carried largely by women who rarely had access to studios or the status of “artist.” Yet their labor fed the broader luxury trade.

“It’s important to not only look at painting but also at other disciplines,” curator Van Dam said. “By combining fine art with applied arts, we get a better overview of the share women had in the economic blossoming of that time.”

The exhibition also revisits the career of Judith Leyster (Dutch, 1609–1660), a rare example of a middle-class woman without an artistic family background who forged a public path. The daughter of a brewer, Leyster joined Haarlem’s guild in 1633. Her self-assurance is echoed in works such as “Young Woman being Harassed by a Man” (1631), in which a man’s coins signal proposition and power while a woman, absorbed in sewing, becomes the moral and psychological center of the scene. The painting has been read as a feminist statement.

But the show does not romanticize the costs. “Eventually the social expectations of a woman at that time conquered her dreams,” Van Dam said. In 1636, Leyster married the painter Jan Miense Molenaer and painted less; only a small number of works are dated after the wedding. After her death, her oeuvre was falsely attributed to Molenaer and to Frans Hals until her rediscovery in the late 19th century.

That sense of achievement shadowed by loss becomes especially poignant in the case of Anna Francisca de Bruyns (Flemish, 1604–?), born in Morialmé. According to a biography written by her son, she never wanted to marry, yet became a wife at 24 and went on to have 12 children. A small sketchbook on view at MSK offers an intimate record of artistic ambition folded into domestic life. On a page with a self-portrait, a child’s hand has written: “this is my Mommy.”

In “Unforgettable,” the most moving moments are often the smallest: a signature changed, a self-portrait newly seen, a line of handwriting that collapses the distance between art history and lived experience. The exhibition argues, with quiet force, that what we inherit as “the canon” is also a record of what society allowed women to keep.

“Unforgettable” is on view at MSK Ghent in 2026.