Reflections on the CNA fellowship
Imagine a 17th-century, Flemish artist sitting in front of their easel ready to start painting. You may have seen images like that before; a painting like Rembrandt’s Artist in his Studio might come to mind. Now imagine the artist is a woman. Do you recall seeing any early modern paintings of women at the easel?
A fabulous example of a painting of a female painter at work is the Self-Portrait by Michaelina Wautier (c. 1614 – 1689). Not too long ago, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston hosted an exhibition organized by students of Brown University on the Flemish artist. In this exhibition, Wautier’s Self-Portrait was displayed directly next to her beautiful series of The Five Senses (a promised gift from Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo). This exhibition was the first ever dedicated to Wautier and her art in the Americas, and proved the perfect opportunity to study her work and artistic practice. My fellowship started as the exhibition came to a close in the fall of 2023, when the paintings were taken off the wall and were available for examination in the Conservation Studio. I was lucky to spend 6 months with these paintings, studying them with a variety of (analytical) research methods, to get a better understanding of Wautier as an artist.
In her Self-Portrait, Wautier depicted herself sitting in an indoor, but undefined space. She is seated on a red leather chair in front of her easel, upon which a canvas is placed. Wautier is holding a palette and several brushes in one hand, a single brush loaded with paint in her other. On her easel rests her ‘mahlstick’, a tool many painters used to rest their hand upon while applying paint to the canvas. On the canvas, faint outlines of an initial painted sketch can be seen: Wautier has defined the composition and is ready to start applying the first colors.
The Self-Portrait seems to have been painted effortlessly, yet when we have a closer look at the painting, we realize that Wautier may have spent several weeks or months working on it. This is visible in the detail of the ‘mahlstick’, for example: the stick was originally not planned, but painted later on top of the pink ribbon of the watch. The pink paint of the ribbon is still visible underneath the black of the mahlstick and wasn’t even dragged when the latter was applied, indicating that the pink paint had already fully dried. It is difficult to determine how much later the mahlstick was painted, but the material evidence suggests at least a couple of weeks had passed before Wautier made this addition to the composition.
The addition of the mahlstick is not the only evidence that Wautier didn’t finish the painting in one sitting: when we look at a detail of the x-radiograph, we can see that she spent quite some time working on her own face. The handling of the brushwork in this area exposes Wautier’s careful, almost painstaking application of the paint. The paint was applied much thicker in the area of her face as compared to the paint elsewhere in the painting. Wautier reworked her face continuously, working wet-in-wet. This might indicate that she struggled with painting her face in the Self-Portrait. Indeed, even nowadays we may take a couple of pictures before we’re fully satisfied with our selfie.
Wautier studied her face scrupulously before starting work on her Self-Portrait. This is evident in her depiction of the two moles on her cheek. In the x-radiograph of the painting, the moles both show up dark – indicating that there is no lead white-based skin color present in this area that would block the x-rays from penetrating the canvas. Wautier left the moles in reserve when she started working up the painting. From the beginning, she knew she was going to add them in those exact locations. Only in the final painting stage did she add a small amount of reddish brown paint, to finish the moles by giving them their characteristic color. This peculiar painting technique can only be used after Wautier had meticulously examined her own face. Moreover, she clearly thought the moles to be characteristic of her own appearance: it wouldn’t be her face without them present.
Due to historical circumstances, we often don’t have many sources for scholarship on women painters. Studying a self-portrait of one of those exceptional women cannot only reveal how they took on the challenge of painting an image of themselves, but also help to a certain degree in our understanding of their personality. Although Wautier presents an idealized version of herself – much like we do in our Instagram posts – we get a sense of the way she wanted to present herself to the outside world. She worked for at least several weeks – if not months – on her Self-Portrait, but from the start, it was clear that her self-image were definitely to include her characteristic birthmarks.
This blogpost was written as a reflection on my time as a fellow at the Center for Netherlandish Art. In 2023-2024, I was the Flanders State of the Art Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the CNA. The fellowship was generously sponsored by the Government of Flanders. The founders of the CNA are Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo and Susan and Matthew Weatherbie.
