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.
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.
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