Ghent show spotlights 40 forgotten baroque women artists
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- MSK Ghent opened "Unforgettable: Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600-1750" this month, after an earlier run in Washington DC, featuring more than 40 female artists from the baroque Low Countries whose work was long misattributed or dismissed.
- The exhibition's catalogue names 179 women who were active in the art economy of the Low Countries between 1600 and 1750, according to co-curator Frederica Van Dam.
- Judith Leyster was admitted to a Haarlem painters' guild in 1630 and produced one of the first artist self-portraits in the Dutch Republic, yet after her death her paintings were attributed to "the wife of the deceased," Frans Hals, or "unknown master," with one work sold off by a major US museum in the 1970s.
- Paper-cutting specialist Johanna Koerten was visited at her Amsterdam home by Russian tsar Peter I in 1697 and earned more than twice what Rembrandt received for The Night Watch for a piece of "woven silk in a rustic manner" made for the Holy Roman Empress.
- Painter Catrina Tieling was nearly lost to history until 2025, when a Dutch art historian re-examined works long credited to her brother Lodewijk and found they were signed "CT"; her Italianate shepherdesses scene is included in the show.
- Louise Hollandine, daughter of exiled royalty, fled a princess life in 1657 to become a French Benedictine nun rather than marry her nephew, and the exhibition contrasts her opulent self-portrait as a court painter with a later austere portrait in a black-and-white habit.
- Co-curator Van Dam said 19th-century art historians — mainly men — wrote women out by "decid[ing] what was good art"; floral still-life painter Rachel Ruysch was deemed derivative despite collectors avidly seeking her work.
Why it matters: By cataloguing 179 women and reattributing works like Tieling's that were filed under male names, the exhibition materially expands the documented record of baroque Low Countries art — and the headline-worthy detail that Koerten out-earned Rembrandt on a single commission quietly resets the default assumption that women of the era were minor or amateur artists.
