In 1993, the art historian Katlijne Van der Stighelen came across a painting by a little-known 17th-century artist named Michaelina Wautier in a storage area at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, one of Vienna’s premier cultural institutions. The discovery set her on a three-decade journey to uncover who the artist was.
On Tuesday, those efforts come full circle when the Kunsthistorisches Museum opens “Michaelina Wautier, Painter,” the largest show of Wautier’s works to date, with 29 paintings and one drawing. (A version of the exhibition will travel to the Royal Academy in London in March 2026.)
“She’s a Flemish Baroque painter, a woman, and for many years people didn’t believe that the canvases done by her were by her,” said Jonathan Fine, the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s director general.
Scholars misattributed her paintings to male contemporaries like Anthony van Dyck and her brother Charles Wautier, doubting that a woman in the Spanish Netherlands in the 1600s would have worked in as wide a range of genres as Wautier did, including portraits, large-scale history scenes and still lifes, including flower paintings.
But in the last few decades, the idea of art history “as the story of great male artists” began to crumble, Fine said. Wautier is one of several female artists whose works have been rediscovered or reappraised in recent years, including Artemisia Gentileschi, now a well-regarded Italian Baroque painter, and Rachel Ruysch, an 18th-century still-life painter from the northern Netherlands.
Unlike those painters, about whom a decent amount of biographical information is available, Wautier is veiled in mystery, with few primary sources to trace her movements and establish clear facts about her life. Much of the scholarship relies on analysis of her works by technical means, such as X-rays and infrared and ultraviolet lights, said Kirsten Derks, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Antwerp in Belgium who has studied Wautier since 2019.
During her research, Derks discovered that Wautier used ultramarine, an expensive and rare pigment, and that unlike many of her contemporaries, she experimented in her studio with grounds, layers of paint that prepare the canvas, and tested how they affected a painting’s tonality.
But, said Van der Stighelen, “the thing that makes the research a bit frustrating is we don’t have any sources revealing anything about her personality, like letters.” (Though Van der Stighelen contributed to the exhibition catalog, she did not curate the show; Gerlinde Gruber did. Julien Domercq is the curator for the Royal Academy version.)
Still, there are hints at the kind of person Wautier was.
In the large-scale “Triumph of Bacchus,” the painting that Van der Stighelen stumbled upon in 1993, half-clothed revelers surround the god of wine, and one woman looks right at the viewer with half of her chest exposed. Some researchers think this represents Wautier herself.
“She was really bold,” Derks said. “She included a self-portrait in that painting with her boob hanging out. I don’t know of any other artist who would dare to do that.”
Wautier, who historians guess was born in 1614 in Belgium, grew up in a family that wasn’t noble but was financially stable and likely had connections to people of higher status. One theory is that Michaelina learned painting from her older brother Charles, with whom she lived in Brussels from the 1630s.
“Charles and Michaelina were very much interested in money,” Van der Stighelen said. “They were buying land and houses.”
The two always went to the notary together to seal their property deals, she added, and signed their names together on contracts. The brother and sister, neither of whom ever married, likely shared an atelier, which would have given Michaelina ample access to materials and possibly to nude models. This might account for how she so accurately captured a range of physiques in “The Triumph of Bacchus,” since female artists weren’t allowed to study nude men at the time.
By 1643, when Michaelina was around 30, she was established enough to paint a portrait of a Spanish general, her earliest dated work. Years later, four of her works entered the collection of the Hapsburg governor of the Spanish Netherlands, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, a key source for the art that visitors see in the Kunsthistorisches Museum today.
In 1650, when Wautier painted “The Five Senses,” a series depicting the experience of sight, smell, touch, sound and taste, she showed boys rather than beautiful women, an atypical choice.
“She’s taking these conventions of how the senses are traditionally depicted and flipping them,” said Alice Limb, a conservator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In “Smell,” rather than showing a woman sniffing a flower,” she shows a boy with a rotten egg. For “Touch,” instead of a man “caressing a sculpture, often of a nude woman, it’s a little boy who cut his finger,” Limb said.
Derks said the models were “probably boys she knew,” and added that Wautier hadn’t idealized them. “She added this gray paint to the fingernails to depict the dirt beneath them,” Derks said.
After receiving an inheritance from their youngest brother in 1660, Michaelina and Charles bought a house in Brussels, where Michaelina resided until her death, probably at age 75. Afterward, she disappeared into obscurity — until Van der Stighelen came along.
For 25 years, Van der Stighelen looked for a museum to showcase Wautier’s work. One museum director told her that an exhibition focused on Wautier would be “from a financial point of view, disastrous,” she said.
But in 2018, she received an opportunity to curate an exhibition that put the artist on the map: “Michaelina Wautier: Baroque’s Leading Lady,” at the Museum aan de Stroom in Antwerp.
Since then, Wautier’s trajectory “has been nothing short of meteoric,” Maja Markovic, a director at Christie’s, wrote in an email. “The market for Wautier remains defined by rarity. Very few securely attributed works have appeared at auction — but when they do, they generate intense interest.”
In 2019, Wautier’s “A Young Man Smoking a Pipe” sold for $759,000, and in 2021, the “Head of a Boy” went for 400,000 pounds, about $560,000 at the time — five to seven times the estimated price.
A 2022 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that featured “The Five Senses” continued to raise Wautier’s profile.
The Vienna show is a culmination, and hopefully, said Fine, the director general, a call to leaders at other museums.
“Michaelina Wautier is a great and interesting Flemish Baroque painter who merits attention and scholarship and more fame,” he said. Yet “The Triumph of Bacchus” languished unnoticed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s collection for more than 300 years. It was time, he said, for museums everywhere to “look again at their collections and to ask: Which stories are hidden in plain sight?”
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