Royal Academy of Arts Brings Baroque Painter Michaelina Wautier to the UK With 25-Work Survey
More than three decades ago, a single painting in a museum storeroom helped reopen a chapter of Baroque art history that had nearly closed. In 1993, Flemish art specialist Katlijne Van der Stighelen encountered a vast Bacchanalian scene while looking through the storage holdings of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. The canvas, later identified as “The Triumph of Bacchus” (c. 1655–59), became the catalyst for the modern rediscovery of Michaelina Wautier (c. 1614–1689), a Flemish painter whose name had faded to the margins of scholarship.
This month, that long-running reassessment arrives in the UK in a major way: the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in London is presenting an exhibition of 25 works by Wautier, offering British audiences a concentrated look at an artist now increasingly recognized as one of the most significant painters of the period.
“She is genuinely a rediscovery of the last 20 or 30 years,” says the RA’s curator Julien Domercq. The show builds on the momentum of earlier research and exhibitions, including the first major presentation of Wautier’s work at the Museum aan de Stroom in Antwerp in 2018 — an event that marked a turning point in public awareness of her achievement.
A life that remains elusive
Despite the growing body of work attributed to her, Wautier’s biography remains fragmentary. She is believed to have been born in Mons around 1614 and later lived in Brussels. Records indicate she had an older brother, Charles, who was also an artist and is known to have trained abroad, possibly in Italy. Scholars have suggested that Wautier may have followed a similar path, or that she worked closely with Charles in his studio.
The gaps in documentation are so pronounced that her emergence as a history painter can feel abrupt. Van der Stighelen writes in the exhibition catalogue that Wautier’s first known history painting appears in 1649 “seemingly out of nowhere.”
What distinguishes Wautier, however, is not only the quality of her work but its breadth. Domercq and other scholars point out that she was exceptional among known women artists of the 17th century for moving fluently across the major genres: portraits, still lifes, history paintings, and genre scenes.
Success in her own time, then centuries of misattribution
Evidence suggests Wautier achieved a measure of recognition during her lifetime. Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria owned four of her works, an indicator of elite patronage in a period when women’s artistic careers were often constrained by training access and social expectations.
After her death in Brussels in 1689, her reputation gradually dimmed. Domercq notes that, like many 17th-century painters, her work appears to have fallen out of fashion in the 18th century. Compounding that shift, Wautier’s paintings were repeatedly reassigned to male artists — “a whole swathe of male painters,” as Domercq puts it — even in cases where her name was inscribed on the work.
“The Triumph of Bacchus,” the very painting that first drew Van der Stighelen’s attention, illustrates the pattern. Over time, the 3.5-meter-wide canvas was variously attributed to the School of Rubens, described as a copy after Rubens, or credited to artists including Luca Giordano and Cornelis Schut. In the early 20th century, the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s curator of Flemish painting, Gustav Glück, dismissed the possibility of a female author in strikingly gendered terms, arguing that “even in our age of female emancipation, one would hardly wish to ascribe this picture, which shows a highly vigorous, almost coarse conception, to a woman’s hand.”
The painting is on loan from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, where a version of the exhibition debuted last year.
What technical study reveals
With archival traces scarce, close analysis of Wautier’s technique has become a crucial tool for scholars. One of the exhibition’s highlights, “The Five Senses” (1650), was long known only through a black-and-white illustration in a 1975 auction catalogue. Detailed study of the suite revealed a surprisingly limited pigment range, consistent with the colors visible on Wautier’s palette in her “Self-portrait” (c. 1650).
Most strikingly, researchers found no blue pigment in “The Five Senses,” despite passages that read as blue to the eye — including the scarf of a boy playing the flute. Domercq explains that Wautier achieved the effect through an optical strategy: by placing contrasting colors around the scarf, she made a gray tone register as blue.
The RA exhibition also includes “Flower Garland with a Butterfly” (1652), another work that has resurfaced as scholarship and provenance research continue to expand Wautier’s known oeuvre.
Taken together, the London presentation underscores how quickly the map of Baroque painting can change when attribution, conservation science, and sustained scholarly attention converge. For Wautier, a painter once treated as a footnote, the story is still unfolding — and, as Van der Stighelen predicted in 2018, more works may yet emerge.
