I mentioned in a post a couple days ago that we’d stopped in at the Museum of Fine Arts (. ) in Ghent. I am not one who seeks out old masters. Sure, I can admire the technical prowess and the part played in the evolution of painting – use of perspective and sometimes painstaking detail, but the subject matter often leaves me gliding past the paintings at an unseemly speed. Now please, no one get on your high horse about my irreverent attitude.
I did find this particular exhibit interesting for revealing the different style that the feminine spirit brought to these paintings. And appreciative that current methods have revealed that some paintings, long thought to have been painted by a man, revealed the signature of a woman underneath.
The most famous documented case is Judith Leyster. After her death, many of her paintings were attributed to Frans Hals. Some say her monogram was ignored or misread. In 1893, a painting sold as a Frans Hals was discovered to bear Leyster’s signature underneath — causing a scandal and a lawsuit. The Louvre owned several “Hals” paintings that had to be quietly reattributed.
I enjoyed the several Leyster paintings on exhibit for their warmth and sense of joy and sometimes impishness. The self portrait below is famous because she’s deliberately pointing her brush at the man’s genitals and it looks like her tongue is in her cheek (ho ho). Certainly her eyes gleam with a bit of mischievous glee.
Two other women painters of note are Artemisia Gentileschi and Angelika Kauffmann. They both had artists for fathers and both had difficult lives — Gentileschi was raped and Kauffmann wound up married to a con artist. Moira and I are particularly well acquainted with Kauffmann, as her earliest works are in a church in Schwarzenberg, Austria, the home for our lieder festival. There is a museum dedicated to her in the village. She eventually wound up in London and was inducted into the Royal Academy. Her paintings are often featured on china tea cups from the time.
Apparently there is an art historian, Griselda Pollock, who wrote about these kinds of things. I’ve not read her work.