The Old Masters Were Women Too
Why did their names vanish for 3 centuries? Discover the incredible journey of 4 masters from Antwerp to Amsterdam and how they finally reclaimed their legacy.
Ghent, March 2026.
On the walls of the city, in the windows of cafes, at the entrance of libraries and theaters, three slogans have appeared.
The Old Masters were women too.
Muse or Master?
She painted, he signed.
The posters lead to the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent. On the facade, the announcement of the exhibition Unforgettable. Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600 to 1750.
More than forty artists from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, brought together for the first time.
From Rachel Ruysch to Johanna Koerten, from Maria Faydherbe to Anna Maria van Schurman, stars of their time whose names have slipped into oblivion. In their day, they painted, sculpted, engraved, sold their work to the courts of Europe, trained pupils, ran workshops. They were read, exhibited, cited in the biographies of their era.
And then, after their death, their names slipped away.
For four of them, the erasure lasted three hundred years. Each through a different path.
Clara Peeters. Judith Leyster. Michaelina Wautier. Maria Sibylla Merian.
This is their story.
1. Clara Peeters, Antwerp, 1612
Antwerp, 1612. Clara Peeters, 25 years old, signs a still life.
Not in the lower corner of the panel, as the painters of the city do. Not on a marble plaque painted in trompe l’oeil, as some do. On the handle of the knife she has just painted.
The knife is not a table detail. It is a bridal knife, the conjugal object given to newlyweds in the Low Countries (modern day Belgium and the Netherlands), on whose handle one engraved both names and moral virtues. On Peeters’ knife, in place of the husband’s name, it is her own.
CLARA PEETERS. In capitals.
The gesture is deliberate.
In 1612 in Antwerp, women painters exist. They can even be members of the Guild of Saint Luke, the all powerful painters’ corporation of the city. But they are rare. Most paint in the workshop of a father, a brother, or a husband, and sign under that workshop’s name. A man’s name.
Peeters is one of the exceptions. No painter father, no family workshop. She runs her own studio. She specializes entirely in still life, a genre that barely exists before her.
Before 1608, the year she paints her first dated work, fewer than five food still life paintings are known to have been produced in all the Low Countries. Five, in total.
Peeters will largely help invent the genre.
The falconry still life, that is her, in 1611, the year Archdukes Albert and Isabella reinstate hunting at court. She also establishes the first codes of the breakfast still life, what Dutch painters will soon call the ontbijtje, which will become a generation later one of the great subgenres of Golden Age painting. She is also one of the first to paint fish.
But she does not place her name on the surface of her canvases. She slips it inside the painting itself.
She places a discreet CLARA P on the edge of a painted table. And in at least eight of her known paintings, she slips her own face into the reflective surfaces of the objects she herself has painted. Silver gilt goblets. Bulging pewter pitchers.
In a still life painted in 1611, her face appears six times in the same painting, on two different objects. In the reflection of the goblet, she stands before her easel, brush in hand, painting. In the reflection of the pitcher, she wears a tall lace bonnet and a white ruff, the large pleated collar typical of women of the Antwerp upper class.
She does not sign the canvas. She paints herself into it.
For centuries, her paintings circulate under her name. But the system is not understood. The signatures engraved into the objects and the tiny self portraits in the pitchers are not read for what they are: a continuous, methodical assertion of who painted the canvas.
It takes the late twentieth century for art historians to start looking at her paintings as closely as she painted them.
Peeters paints for over thirty years. After 1639, nothing. No will, no last dated painting. She is 52, and she vanishes from the archives.
The exhibition Unforgettable brings together six of her paintings. The still life with cheeses and shrimp is among them. If you step close to the panel, both gestures appear side by side: the name engraved on the handle of the bridal knife, and the tiny face of the painter in the reflection of the jug’s lid.
2. Judith Leyster, Haarlem, 1635
Haarlem, 1635. Before the officers of the Guild of Saint Luke, Judith Leyster, 26 years old, files a complaint against Frans Hals.
Hals is 53. He is the most famous master painter in the city. He has just accepted into his workshop a young apprentice, Willem Wouters, who had begun his training with Leyster a few days earlier. Wouters left Leyster without the guild’s permission. Hals recruited him.
Leyster attacks, before the most powerful institution in the city, the most respected master in the trade.
The ruling comes a few weeks later. Wouters’ mother pays four guilders to Leyster, half the sum she had claimed. Hals pays a fine of three guilders. Wouters is no longer allowed to paint in Hals’ workshop. Leyster, too, is sanctioned for failing to register the apprentice in time with the guild.