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‘Women Artists of the Dutch Golden Age’ Review: Pedagogy Without Pandering

An informative, sometimes surprising show looks at eight female artists who worked during the 17th and early 18th centuries without playing to modern trends.

By

 Karen Wilkin 

Nov. 12, 2019 5:03 pm ET

Clara Peeters’s ‘Still Life of Fish and Cat’ (after 1620) Photo: National Museum of Women in the Arts

My first response to news of the exhibition “Women Artists of the Dutch Golden Age” was not enthusiastic. Resurrecting obscure female painters, writers, musicians and the like is something of an industry among aspiring academics and the show’s being organized for the National Museum of Women in the Arts was another strike against it; I’ve never believed in ghettoization. But my curiosity grew when I learned that the curator, Virginia Treanor, had been a student of Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. , the legendary authority on the Netherlandish 17th century and former curator of Northern Baroque Art at the National Gallery. As it turns out, “Women Artists of the Dutch Golden Age” is modest, thoughtfully selected, informative and sometimes surprising. The artists’ histories are always interesting—sometimes more interesting than their work—and there are some compelling works on view.

Women Artists of the Dutch Golden Age

National Museum of Women in the Arts 
Through Jan. 5, 2020

Eight artists who worked during the 17th and early 18th centuries are included, represented by works drawn largely from the museum’s own collection. It’s a small sampling, we learn, of the many women during that period in Holland who, like their male counterparts, provided a thriving art market with paintings and prints. They are Clara Peeters (1594-after 1657), Magdalena van de Passe (c. 1600-1638), Anna Maria van Schurman (1607-1678), Judith Leyster (1609-1660), Maria Schalcken (c. 1645/1650-c. 1700), Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), Alida Withoos (c.1661-1730), and Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750). 

Unusually for her time, when women artists normally acquired their craft skills from relatives, Leyster learned from established master Frans Hals in her native Haarlem, before marrying a painter and moving to Amsterdam. But several others, including Van de Passe, Schalcken, and Withoos, were the daughters or sisters of artists. They entered the family business and sometimes passed it on. Van de Passe, for example, like her father and brothers, an accomplished engraver, taught the technique to Van Schurman. Ruysch’s father was a noted scientist and professor at the Amsterdam Botanical Garden; his daughter is thought to have helped him draw botanical specimens before she married a fellow artist, embarked on a six-decade-long painting career, and produced 11 children. (The wall text reassures us that since both Ruysch and her husband were very successful, they could afford help.)

Judith Leyster’s ‘The Concert’ (c. 1633) Photo: National Museum of Women in the Arts

Many of the eight specialized in floral still lifes, a subject probably thought suitable for women, although it was not exclusively their province. Peeters, an admired flower painter, was also apparently the first artist to specialize in still lifes of fish—witness her “Still Life of Fish and Cat” (after 1620), with delectable crayfish and a plump creature with sparkling scales. The cat eyeing the bounty is less convincing, but in compensation, we can identify every bloom in Peeters’s nearby “Still Life of Lilies, Roses, Iris, Pansies, Columbine, Love-in-a-Mist, Larkspur and Other Flowers in a Glass Vase on a Table Top, Flanked by a Carnation and a Rose” (c. 1610), as we also can in Ruysch’s and Withoo’s lush gatherings. Withoos was commissioned to record plants for botanists, yet her works are also fantastic. In those on view, an improbable assortment of wild and cultivated varieties grow together on the forest floor. (There’s a charming toad in the corner of one picture.) 

Gorgeous, larger-than-life color engravings of tropical vegetation, displayed in bold, graphic arrangements, attest to the intrepid Merian’s two years in Suriname, then part of the vast international Dutch trading empire. The painter/naturalist’s exhaustive field notes on South American flora, insect life, and customs she made before returning to Amsterdam became the basis for this exhibition’s prints. Merian’s fascination with the life cycles of insects adds a lively cast of characters to the engravings. 

Rachel Ruysch’s ‘Flowers in a Vase’ (mid-1680s) Photo: National Museum of Women in the Arts

Van Schurman, represented by two notably different self-portrait engravings, supposedly made the same year, from the same plate, is most fascinating for her biography. Daughter of an important printmaker, she was a celebrated intellectual, the first Dutch woman to attend university (seated behind a curtain). She corresponded with scholars in 13 languages, and, among many other things, published a book debating “Whether a Maid May Be a Scholar,” which appeared in Latin in 1640 and in English in 1659. It was said in her lifetime that visiting Utrecht without seeing Anna Maria van Schurman was like visiting Rome and not seeing the pope.

Leyster, the best known of the show’s artists, was also, as a figure painter, the most ambitious. In “The Concert” (c. 1633), one of her frequent music-making themes, she holds a songbook, seated between a violinist and a lute player, one in elegant black, the other in rose. The vigorous brushwork and the protagonists’ animated expressions seem to confirm her reputed connection with Hals. 

It was believed that Leyster stopped painting after 1637, when she and her husband moved to Amsterdam and began raising children, but the Washington show boasts a recently discovered self-portrait, thought to date from the 1650s. Fashionably clad in black with wonderfully painted lace, Leyster presents herself as a painter with a palette, gazing steadily at us, as if defying any challenges to her status as a serious artist. 

“Women Artists of the Dutch Golden Age” makes no extravagant claims for the merits of the artists on view, but simply enlarges our conception of the period. We learn a lot. 

—Ms. Wilkin is an independent curator and critic.