Catharina van Hemessen

Flemish painter

• Born: 1528
• Birthplace: Antwerp, Flanders (now in Belgium)
• Died: After 1587
• Place of death: Antwerp?, Flanders (now in Belgium)

Van Hemessen was a renowned portraitist who brought a subdued and naturalistic approach to her subject matter and saw descriptive potential in the painting of details. She was supported by wealthy and powerful patrons, especially Queen Mary of Hungary.

Early Life

Catharina van Hemessen (kaht-ah-REEN-ah vahn HAY-mehs-sehn) was born in a bustling commercial port and a major center of European banking. A number of important painters established their workshops in Antwerp, including Pieter Aertsen, Frans Floris, and Pieter Bruegel, the Elder, which was home to a vibrant arts scene.

Van Hemessen was the daughter of one of Antwerp’s leading mannerist painters, Jan Sanders van Hemessen, known for his moralizing genre scenes and history paintings. Her upbringing was typical of most women artists of the early modern period. Although women had always made art, and famous female artists can be documented from ancient times through the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance it became increasingly difficult for them to pursue professional careers.

As the status of art and artists rose in the Renaissance, professional regulations became stricter, restricting women’s and girls’ access to apprenticeships. Concurrently, women’s lives were increasingly circumscribed by social and political constraints, the demands of family life, and legal restrictions. One could argue that the careers of aspiring female artists fell victim in the Renaissance to the increasingly strict divide between the public and private spheres. As a result, fewer women were able to consider professional careers as artists unless they were noblewomen, such as Italian painter Sofonisba Anguissola, or the daughters of artists, such as van Hemessen and others who received training from their fathers.

Life’s Work

Van Hemessen’s work as a painter is especially significant because of the era in which she worked, but her work is especially meaningful because ten known paintings are signed by her: eight portraits and two religious scenes, all of which date from between 1548 and 1552. Because the work of many women artists still remains unknown, waiting to be uncovered in museum storerooms, churches, private collections, and other places, van Hemessen’s signature on each of these ten paintings takes on added importance: Her legacy as a painter, and as a painter who was also a woman, can receive its due. That van Hemessen signed these works testifies also to the new awareness of the individual in the Renaissance and to the heightened status of painters and painting during this time.

Even when women in the Renaissance were able to pursue careers as painters, their opportunities for advancement were limited. Most female artists painted miniatures, worked on manuscript illuminations, or worked as copyists. Many pursued careers as portraitists, as did van Hemessen. Very few women worked in the highly regarded genres of historical, biblical, or mythological painting because such compositions required mastery of the male nude. Until the modern era, women were forbidden to draw from the nude male model. Thus, it is noteworthy that van Hemessen executed at least two religious paintings. These are signed depictions of Christ Carrying the Cross and Infant Christ and St. John the Baptist Playing with a Lamb .

The artist’s surviving portraits reveal that although she trained with her father, van Hemessen rejected his complex mannerist style for a more naturalistic approach. This can be seen in her reserved Self-Portrait , signed and dated 1548 in a prominent Latin inscription. Van Hemessen presents herself at work at her easel, displaying the tools of her trade and executing a human figure, considered the height of a painter’s skill. She appears modestly dressed, with her head covered and wearing a long-sleeved velvet dress with pink trimming. In her right hand she holds a brush, with which she paints a human face, steadying her hand with a tool called a mahlstick. Her left hand grasps a palette and additional brushes. Her strategies of self-presentation are in keeping with the latest in artists’ self-portraits and sixteenth century discussions of the status of painting.

Self-Portrait forms a pair with van Hemessen’s Young Woman Playing the Virginal (1548), which, as suggested by the art historian Eleanor Tufts, most likely depicts her older sister Christina. Viewed together, the paintings give visual form to the importance accorded the liberal arts during the Renaissance by depicting painting, music, and literature, the latter alluded to by the Latin inscription.

Van Hemessen’s other portraits hang in world-renowned museums, including Portrait of a Woman (1551) and Portrait of a Man (1552), both in London’s National Gallery. Their style reveals the influence of Netherlandish artist Anthonis Mor. As court painter in Spain, Mor was credited with inventing a more sober approach to portraiture. His influence is revealed in van Hemessen’s subdued palette, the two-thirds length view of the sitters, her use of neutral backgrounds, and the overall reserve of her portraits. In keeping with Netherlandish representational strategies, van Hemessen emphasized the descriptive potential of paint, carefully depicting the details of clothing and facial physiognomy.

In 1554, van Hemessen married musician and composer Chrétien de Morien in Antwerp. Two years later, in 1556, the couple left for Spain as part of the entourage of Queen Mary of Hungary , regent of the Netherlands. Queen Mary had resigned her post to retire with her brother Charles V , king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, to a secluded monastery in Spain, employing fifty-six ships to transport her entourage and belongings. It has been assumed that while in Spain, van Hemessen painted for the queen, although no paintings have been identified. Queen Mary’s female relatives at the Spanish court, including two of the four wives of King Philip II (Charles V’s successor), queens Isabel of Valois and Anne of Austria, both commissioned works from another famous artist, Sofonisba Anguissola, named court painter from 1559 to 1573. It is also possible that, like many other women artists of the time, van Hemessen gave up painting after her marriage.

Van Hemessen and de Morien left Spain in 1558 after Queen Mary’s death, the beneficiaries of a lifelong pension provided by the queen. The last years of their life probably were spent in Antwerp, the site of religious and civil wars waged between Catholics and Protestants from 1566 until 1585. Van Hemessen, a Catholic, died sometime after 1587.

Significance

Van Hemessen was praised by several sixteenth and seventeenth century writers, including the art historian and painter Giorgio Vasari, in his classic work Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, da cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri (1550; Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects , 1855-1885). Van Hemessen is also one of the first-documented Flemish woman artists, along with the court painter Levina Teerlinc (d. 1576), and is considered the most important Northern Renaissance woman artist.

Her work has helped fill in the largely empty historical record of women artists. Women have always made art, but their artistic contributions began to “disappear” from official histories in the early twentieth century as art history was institutionalized as a professional discipline. Feminist art historians have argued that many women’s artistic contributions were dismissed when a form of quality recognition based solely on the art of men or on men’s sensibilities rendered art by women not worthy of study and documentation. Thus, the recovery of women’s artworks, like those of van Hemessen, is important not only for correcting the historical record but also for calling into question the canon of art history.

Bibliography

Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. 3d ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002. An excellent book by one of the most important scholars of women’s art, which provides considerable information on the social and political contexts in which women artists worked.

Gaze, Delia, ed. Dictionary of Women Artists. 2 vols. London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997. An excellent reference work on women artists, this comprehensive dictionary contains a detailed entry for van Hemessen.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Women Artists: 1550-1950. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. The catalog of an important exhibition, containing informative essays by two major feminist art historians, Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin. Includes reproductions of several of van Hemessen’s paintings.

Nochlin, Linda. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays. New York: Harper and Row, 1988. Originally published in 1971, this work is required reading for anyone interested in the history of women artists. It questions the erasure of women from the art-historical record, thus critiquing the underlying biases of the field of art history.

Parker, Rozsika, and Griselda Pollock. Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology. New York: Pantheon, 1981. An important text for the history and politics of writing about women’s art, including thought-provoking discussion of the stereotypes associated with women as art makers.

Tufts, Eleanor. Our Hidden Heritage: Five Centuries of Women Artists. New York: Paddington, 1975. A book by a pioneer in the “recovery” of women’s art. One of the most thorough discussions of van Hemessen’s career, including reproductions of her work, with an entire chapter dedicated to the artist.