Catharina van Hemessen, the earliest identifiable female Flemish painter, gets a free room at the National Gallery as the Van Eyck portraits near their close.
The National Gallery shows the signed works of Catharina van Hemessen in a free display at Trafalgar Square from Thursday 4 March 2027. She is the earliest female Flemish painter whose paintings can be securely identified.
She learned to paint from her father, Jan Sanders van Hemessen, in Antwerp, where women were not admitted to the guild system that trained everybody else. She signed her work.
In 1548 she painted herself at twenty, sitting at an easel with a brush in her hand and the picture half-finished in front of her. It may be the first self-portrait by any artist at work at an easel.
Maria of Austria, then regent of the Netherlands, was her patron, and Van Hemessen went to Spain in her household. After 1565 she disappears from the record. About a dozen paintings survive, small and mostly of women.
The display runs until Sunday 30 May 2027, in a room beside the Gallery’s Van Eyck portraits, which enter their final weeks as it opens. The two Netherlandish rooms sit side by side.