This 17th-Century Female Artist Was Once a Bigger Star Than Rembrandt. Why Did History Forget About Johanna Koerten and Her Peers?

A new exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts spotlights 40 women who found fame in the Low Countries between 1600 and 1750, including Koerten, Judith Leyster and Clara Peeters

A portrait of Johanna Koerten, whose “thread painting” for the wife of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I sold for more money than Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, one of the most famous artworks of all time Rijksmuseum via Wikimedia Commons

Meilan Solly – Senior Associate Digital Editor, History

Around the turn of the 17th century, the Dutch artist Johanna Koerten sold a “sublime work consisting of flowers, arms, eagles [and] crowns, decorated in foliage, of woven silk in a rustic manner,” to the wife of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I. According to the biographer who wrote this description, the empress paid at least 4,000 guilders for the textile—more than double the amount received by Koerten’s better-known contemporary, Rembrandt van Rijn, for his monumental 1642 masterpiece, The Night Watch.

Today, The Night Watch is one of the most famous paintings of all time, its creator lionized as one of the greatest artists to ever live. Meanwhile, the Koerten “thread painting” that once commanded a higher price than Rembrandt’s group portrait is lost, and its creator is virtually unknown to the general public.

A new exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, D.C. seeks to correct this gender imbalance, arguing that women were instrumental in defining the visual culture of the 17th-century Low Countries, which encompassed modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands. Organized in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium, “Women Artists From Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600-1750” features nearly 150 artworks by 40 women, many of which are on view in the United States for the first time.

Paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints form the bulk of the art on display, but the show also highlights embroidery, lace and paper cuttings. These mediums have long been overlooked as “women’s work,” but they were highly valued in the 17th and 18th centuries, as evidenced by the high prices fetched by Koerten’s work. “I cannot overemphasize … how famous she was in her day,” says NMWA’s Virginia Treanor, who co-curated the exhibition with the Museum of Fine Art’s Frederica van Dam.Report This Ad

While modern observers might think that Koerten was the exception rather than the norm, Treanor points out that many of the female artists featured in the show, including Judith Leyster, Clara Peeters and Rachel Ruysch, “were very well known during their lifetimes. They were praised for their achievements. This is to dispel any kind of notion that women were not allowed to make art in the 17th century or that they were toiling away in obscurity.” In truth, Treanor adds, “it was social status, even more so than gender, that really determined” whether women had access to artistic training and opportunities.

The show is the “first exhibition of its kind to rewrite the art history of this culturally significant era from the perspective of women artists,” says NMWA’s director, Susan Fisher Sterling. (The era in question was formerly known as the “Dutch Golden Age,” a term that has fallen out of favor in recent years as cultural institutions reckon with the role of slavery and colonialism in enabling this period of prosperity.) Museums around the world have staged exhibitions on some of the individual artists featured, and NMWA hosted a smaller-scale exhibition featuring 20 paintings and prints by eight female artists in 2019. But as Treanor says in a statement, “there has never before been a survey exhibition devoted to multiple women artists and diverse artistic mediums of the period.”

Asserting presence through self-portraits and signatures

“Women Artists From Antwerp to Amsterdam” is divided into four thematic sections: presence, choices, economy, and legacy and value. Up first is presence, which examines the ways in which women asserted their status as artists during the 17th and early 18th centuries. “Whether they depicted themselves with the tools of their trade or conspicuously and proudly placed their signatures on their work, women were not hesitant to declare their roles as creators,” reads the exhibition’s wall text.Report This Ad

Around 1630, when Leyster was in her early 20s, she created a famous self-portrait that shows the artist smiling as she turns to face the viewer, looking away from the painting in progress on her easel. Her pose is relaxed and her expression confident, conveying the message that Leyster is in her element—a fact underscored by the 18-plus paintbrushes she grasps in her left hand. Comparatively, a later self-portrait is more subdued, showing an older woman with a bold but less strident gaze. Yet Leyster is “still presenting herself as a painter” by holding a palette and a paintbrush, says Treanor. “That’s how she’s identifying herself,” even after she’d married and had children.

Maria Schalcken’s Self-Portrait in Her Studio (circa 1680) similarly portrays its creator at work, caught in the act of painting a landscape. Art historians had previously attributed the portrait to Schalcken’s brother, Godefridus Schalcken, but conservation in the late 20th century revealed her signature on the canvas. Interestingly, the only other surviving painting by Maria was also misattributed to Godefridus, as the piece’s signature only includes the siblings’ last name. The Leiden Collection, which houses Boy Offering Grapes to a Woman (circa 1675-1682), posits that a former owner erased Schalcken’s first name from the signature, which otherwise closely matches the one on her self-portrait, “evidently [thinking] it might prove more profitable to let it pass for a work by Godefridus.”Report This Ad

Another female artist who used her signature to claim authorship was the Flemish sculptor Maria Faydherbe. Several of her small-scale wood sculptures feature the carved Latin phrase “Maria Faydherbe me fecit,” or “Maria Faydherbe made me.” Mechelen, the Flemish city where Faydherbe was based, “was a pre-eminent center for these types of sculptures, but it was very unusual for wood carvers to sign their outputs,” says co-curator van Dam.

In addition to signing her name to her work, Faydherbe argued that she was just as skilled as the male sculptors in the Mechelen artists’ guild, “brazenly and boastfully” dismissing them as “hack workers,” according to a 1633 petition presented by the men in question. (Some female artists, like Leyster and Ruysch, were members of guilds, which “controlled the local markets and protected their members against competition from the outside,” per the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. But others, including Faydherbe, made a living without guild support.)

The decisions that shaped women’s artistic careers

Whether a Dutch or Flemish woman could pursue a career in art during the 17th and 18th centuries often came down to her family. Some of the featured individuals, from Catarina Ykens II to Maria de Grebber, were born into artistic families that encouraged their children to learn the trade. These women trained alongside their brothers or fathers; in many instances, relatives mirrored their loved ones’ artistic styles.Report This Ad

“All the artists employed in a family business produced works in a similar style, which were then marketed under a single ‘brand name’ and were often signed exclusively by the head of the studio, that is to say a registered (male) guild master,” write Treanor and Inez De Prekel, a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, in the exhibition catalog.

In the show, artist Magdalena van de Passe is represented by an engraving of Katherine Villiers, the English Duchess of Buckingham, whom Treanor describes as the “Taylor Swift of her time.” On the back of the copper plate, a child has etched a crude copy of the portrait, leaving markings that “speak to the familial nature of the van de Passe workshop,” write Treanor and De Prekel in the catalog.

Fun facts: The scandalous Villiers family

• Born Katherine Manners, the future Duchess of Buckingham was one of the wealthiest heiresses in Great Britain. In 1620, she married George Villiers, a favorite of England’s king, James I.
• James showered George with immense favor, elevating him from cupbearer to one of the highest-ranking men in the kingdom in just a few years. Both at the time and in the centuries since, observers speculated that the pair’s relationship was romantic in nature. The king referred to his favorite as “my sweetheart” or “sweet child and wife.”

For those who weren’t raised in a bustling family workshop, wealth was a deciding factor in whether a woman had access to creative opportunities. Middle- and upper-class families could afford to send their daughters to train with established artists, as Rusych did with still life painter Willem van Aelst. (Leyster, whose family wasn’t particularly wealthy, nevertheless managed to obtain an apprenticeship with a master painter, likely the Dutch artist Frans Hals.) Women born into poorer families, however, had few options when it came to artistic pursuits. They had to work to survive, and this work often involved lace-making.

“Think about all those great 17th-century portraits—Rembrandt, Frans Hals—everyone’s wearing lace,” says Treanor. “Who made all that lace? … It was women, and it was usually women of the lower classes.”

Works on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art present two distinct visions of women’s labor. Nicolaes Maes’ The Lacemaker (circa 1656) shows a young mother leaning over an incomplete piece of lace as the baby beside her placidly peers out at the viewer. It’s “a quiet and intimate moment,” according to Treanor, aptly fitting into the popular 17th-century genre of solitary women at work in serene domestic spaces.Report This Ad

While this vision isn’t “completely inaccurate,” the curator adds, “the reality was a bit different,” as exemplified by Geertruydt Roghman’s series Five Feminine Occupations (circa 1640-1657). The five engravings depict women engaged in everyday household tasks, like cleaning, cooking, sewing and spinning. In Two Women Sewing, Roghman rejects romanticization, showing one of her subjects bent over her work, straining her eyes to see by the waning light of a candle as she warms her feet in the freezing room. The artist is “really capturing, dare I say, the drudgery of a lot of daily domestic work,” Treanor says.

Another painting that speaks to the centrality of choice—or lack thereof—is an enormous portrait borrowed from the Maidens’ House, a former orphanage in Antwerp, Belgium. In the background of the scene, dozens of young girls make lace as the charitable institution’s patrons smile proudly in the foreground. “This painting … allows us to talk about issues of class, because of course these were all poorer girls, not necessarily orphans, but maybe girls whose families couldn’t afford their upkeep, who would be sent to homes like this to receive an education and learn a skill that they could then take into domestic work in wealthier households,” Treanor says. The contrast between lace, “a very expensive material to procure, being made by children who were being housed and clothed and fed but not being paid for their labor, necessarily,” is evident.

During this period, marrying and having children often—but not always—altered women’s artistic pursuits. Art historians previously thought that Leyster stopped painting after she wed fellow artist Jan Miense Molenaer in 1636, but the rediscovery of her later self-portrait, as well as a 1654 still life of flowers in a vase, suggests otherwise. Some women rejected marriage altogether, instead choosing a religious life. Ykens, for one, decided to become a spiritual daughter, taking a vow of chastity and piety without needing to move to a convent and live as a nun. “She could live in her own house, and she could build the career she wanted,” van Dam says. “Apparently, she wanted to paint.”

How women drove the artistic economy

A foundational argument of the exhibition is that women played a significant role in the Low Countries’ artistic economy, whether by producing lace and fine textiles or selling their art to international buyers. Antwerp boasted a lively open art market in the 17th century, with artists creating works on speculation instead of waiting around for a wealthy patron to commission a portrait or a church to commission an altarpiece. A pair of Clara Peeters paintings held by NMWA and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp feature virtually identical carp, suggesting the artist probably used a type of stencil to reproduce certain elements across multiple still lifes. “It wasn’t just her,” Treanor says. “Many other artists did this, too, to be able to reproduce [art] more quickly, because the more paintings they can sell, the more quickly they can sell, the more money they’re going to get.”

Another money-savvy artist spotlighted in the show is Johanna Vergouwen, who painted copies of old master canvases for export to South America. Her re-creations of history paintings by Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck won her acclaim from a contemporary biographer, who wrote that she painted every stroke “as exactingly as the original’s art, / Such wondrous power her celebrated brush imparts.” As van Dam writes in the exhibition catalog, “At the time, the copying and imitation of works of art was viewed as a separate profession and appreciated as an artistic skill in its own right.”Report This Ad

“Women Artists From Antwerp to Amsterdam” also explores the dark side of the era’s thriving economy, which relied heavily on slavery. Botanical artist Maria Sibylla Merian created watercolors of the flora and fauna of Suriname, which was then a Dutch colony in South America. Much of the information she relayed back home came from enslaved people. “She readily credits them for imparting knowledge to her, for helping her procure specimens, but also for imparting knowledge about the uses of particular plants,” says Treanor. One such plant, the peacock flower, was used by some enslaved women to abort their pregnancies, as they didn’t want their children to be born into slavery. “It’s this really kind of chilling window into this moment in history,” Treanor adds. “It’s this imparting of knowledge from women to women.”

The legacy and value of female artists

The final section of the exhibition examines why these female artists have been overshadowed by their male peers for centuries.

Biographies written by the women’s contemporaries show that they were highly respected during their lifetimes, even if they were later eclipsed by their male peers in the art historical canon. In The Great Theater of Netherlandish Painters and Paintresses, an early 18th-century book on display at NMWA, three women (including Koerten) are honored with engraved portraits. Anna Maria van Schurman, a printmaker and painter who was the first woman to attend university in the Dutch Republic, not only appears on the same page as Rembrandt but is also featured more prominently than him, at the top of a group of three artists.

Yet museums established in Europe and the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries overwhelmingly collected works by male artists rather than female artists—a trend that persists today. Treanor points to Koerten, who was best known for her painstakingly crafted paper cuttings, emphasizing the gap between how works were valued in the 17th century versus today. Although “lace was much more expensive to procure than painting,” few of these intricate fabrics have been preserved. As the exhibition’s wall text notes, “A traditional artistic hierarchy, which holds representational art such as painting and sculpture at the apex, has long excluded mediums in which women were prominent, such as textile works.”

One of the paintings featured in the show, Leyster’s Boy Holding Grapes and a Hat (circa 1630), was originally attributed to Hals. The two artists’ styles are so similar that some experts think the former trained under the latter. In the 1970s, when scholars suggested the work should be reattributed to Leyster, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art decided to sell it. The canvas resurfaced in 2022 amid a wave of renewed interest in Leyster, and the Currier Museum of Art in New Hampshire acquired it for an undisclosed sum of money “on par with what a [Hals] painting would bring in,” says Treanor. “That’s just a little snapshot of the fluctuations of how art by women has been valued.”

Though “Women Artists From Antwerp to Amsterdam” represents a milestone in the ongoing effort to restore women to the art historical canon, more work remains to be done. “Women were a really integral part of the artistic economy of the time, and we really haven’t seen that represented in the art history of the period,” Treanor says. “And that can affect a lot of different things. That affects how paintings and textiles are conserved—or not. It can affect the market value of works. It can affect our understanding of the time period overall if we only have one side of the story.”“Women Artists From Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600-1750” is on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. through January 11, 2026.