Catharina van Hemessen, 'Portrait of a Woman', 1551

Catharina van Hemessen is the earliest Flemish woman artist for whom verifiable work survives. She signed this portrait in Latin in the top right corner: CATHARINA DE/HEMESSEN PINGEBAT/1551 (‘Catharine de Hemessen was painting [this] 1551’), when she was only 23 years old.

We do not know who the sitter was, but she was evidently wealthy. Her fine shirt, visible at her neck and wrists, is ornamented with delicate black embroidery, and only loosely tied across her neck; the bodice of her dress is corded and watered silk. Her sleeves are of red velvet, her skirt made of black damask. She holds a pair of gloves, presumably leather, decorated with black and golden embroidery. Her belt is made of black beads and cylinders, held in place with gold settings. It may likely carry a pomander (a round vessel, usually a fine piece of gilded metalwork, containing perfume) at its end. A small dog with what seem to be bells on its collar is tucked under her arm. Portraits of affluent women with pet animals were quite common in the sixteenth century; both Bronzino at the Medici court in Florence (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and the Netherlandish painter Antonis Mor at the Imperial court in Madrid (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid) have portrayed their female sitters with their lapdogs.

The portrait is in good condition. The panel is one board of oak which has been slightly trimmed on the right and at the bottom, but very little has been lost. The ground is chalk; over that is a thin, pale salmon-pink priming of lead white pigment mixed with some red lead. No underdrawing can be seen in infrared reflectograms.

Catharina worked on this portrait with a remarkable degree of painterly freedom, as suggested by the reserves (areas left temporarily blank and later filled in with objects or figures), which in some areas do not correspond with the final state of the painting. The dog’s head has a reserve, but the complex position of its body held delicately under the sitter’s arm and its paws were only defined in the painting process. The bluish whites of the woman’s eyes are painted over a pink basic flesh colour. The reds in the flesh are mostly red lake; some areas of vermilion may be old retouching, but some are clearly original, like the sitter’s lower lip and the dog’s ear.

Only eight portraits and very few devotional paintings signed by Catharina survive in public collections around the world, with several attributed works in public and private collections in need of further study.

Trained in the workshop of her father, the prolific Antwerp painter Jan Sanders van Hemessen, Catharina produced refined small-scale portraits and religious scenes. Her sitters’ bearings and attire conform to official portrait types popular at the Habsburg court. The small format turns them into intimate marvels that showcase the painter’s skill. Her pictures were sought after by collectors at the time much like those of her female Italian contemporaries. The Florentine writer Ludovico Guicciardini, who had lived several years in the Netherlands, praised her as one of only four women artists from Antwerp in his description of the Low Countries (Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, 1567). He does not fail to mention that she and her husband, a famed organist, followed Mary of Hungary to Spain, where they stayed until the queen’s death in 1558 before returning to the Netherlands.