Unlike other women contemporaries, Michaelina Wautier (1604–89) was very much at home with history painting, the prestige genre of the period. Though she suffered the posthumous indignity of having many of her mythological and biblical scenes attributed to men (including her brother Charles), Wautier, who took up painting in her late thirties, was renowned in her lifetime: Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria, for instance, bought several of her paintings. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, which holds the world’s most significant collection of Wautier’s work, is putting on a major survey that includes The Triumph of Bacchus (before 1659), with its bold presentation of male anatomy, and The Five Senses (1650), which comprises five spirited studies of boys looking, tasting, hearing, smelling and touching that are on display in Europe for the first time (30 September–22 February 2026).
Find out more from the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s website.
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