LONDON.- The Royal Academy of Arts presents the first UK exhibition of the trailblazing Baroque painter Michaelina Wautier (about 1614–1689). Active in seventeenth century Brussels, she was one of the foremost artists of the period, who transcended the usual limitations imposed on women. Yet, until the last decade, her work has been relatively forgotten, and much about her life and oeuvre remains to be uncovered. This exhibition presents the most comprehensive survey of Wautier’s work to date, bringing together approximately 25 paintings from across her career, shown alongside select works by her brother Charles Wautier and her contemporaries Peter Paul Rubens and David Teniers the Younger.

Wautier produced paintings of astonishing ambition and sophistication, tackling subjects that were usually the sole domain of male painters and mastering an exceptional range of genres – from still life and portraiture to religious imagery and large-scale history painting. A direct contemporary of Artemisia Gentileschi, she was highly successful in her time. However, her works remained overlooked or misattributed from the eighteenth century until 1993, when art historian Katlijne Van der Stighelen encountered an unsigned painting in storage at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and traced it back to Wautier. Van der Stighelen’s subsequent research culminated in the landmark 2018 exhibition Michaelina: Baroque’s Leading Lady at the Museum aan de Stroom, Antwerp. Since then, newly attributed paintings and ongoing scholarship have continued to transform our understanding of Wautier’s achievements.

The exhibition begins by considering Wautier’s skill as a portraitist, revealing an artist at the centre of Brussels’s high society, with an exceptional ability to capture both character and presence. Her Self-Portrait, about 1650 (Private Collection), is displayed in dialogue with Rubens’s Self-Portrait, about 1638 (Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Picture Gallery), subtly illuminating the self-fashioning strategies of two contemporaries. Other highlights include Portrait of a Military Commander, 1646 (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels) and Portrait of Martino Martini, 1654 (The Klesch Collection).

The subsequent room focuses on Wautier’s religious paintings; an uncommon pursuit for women artists of the time, particularly at the scale and ambition that she achieved. Her altarpiece-sized canvases reveal her command of complex compositions and her nuanced approach to sacred subjects. Her tender, humanised figures in paintings such as The Education of the Virgin, 1656 (Private Collection, by courtesy of the Hoogsteder Museum Foundation) and Saint John the Evangelist, about 1656–59 (Private Collection), exemplify her ability to infuse traditional themes with unique emotional depth, while works perhaps produced in collaboration with her brother provide rare insight into their close creative relationship and shared studio practice.

The final room highlights a selection of Wautier’s most innovative and daring works. Her recently rediscovered series The Five Senses, 1650 (Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection), in which each sense is embodied by a different young boy engaged in everyday activities, represents a striking departure from convention. While such allegorical series typically portrayed idealised female figures accompanied by beautiful objects, Wautier instead presents lively, highly individualized models, rendered with humour, empathy and an acute attention to character.

The exhibition culminates with Wautier’s monumental The Triumph of Bacchus, about 1655-59 (Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Picture Gallery), once part of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm’s renowned collection and now a highlight of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Wautier includes her own likeness among the revellers, portraying herself as a bacchante who meets the viewer’s gaze in a striking act of self-assertion within a grand mythological scene. The canvas is flanked by two of her flower paintings – works expected of women artists at the time – offering a compelling counterpoint to the audacity and scale of the painting they frame. From a precise vantage point in the final gallery, visitors are able to simultaneously view both her early Self-Portrait in the first gallery and her self-insertion within The Triumph of Bacchus, completed about a decade later, showing how she consciously fashioned her image across different moments and contexts in her career.

This show unites Wautier’s oeuvre under one roof to define the breadth of her achievement more completely, and in the hope of inspiring future discoveries.