Catharina van Hemessen: Signature Works

In 1548 Catharina van Hemessen painted herself at twenty, sitting at an easel with a brush in her hand and the picture she is making half-finished in front of her. It may be the first self-portrait by any artist at work at an easel, not a face but a painter painting, and it was made by a woman in Antwerp at a point when women were not admitted to the guild system that trained everybody else. She learned from her father, Jan Sanders van Hemessen, signed her work, and is the earliest female Flemish painter whose paintings can be securely identified.

She was patronised by Maria of Austria, then regent of the Netherlands, went to Spain in her household, and after 1565 disappears from the record entirely. Her surviving output is about a dozen paintings, small, mostly of women, and painted with a directness that makes the grand Antwerp portraiture around them look staged.

The National Gallery shows her signed works from Thursday 4 March to Sunday 30 May 2027, admission free. It opens as the Van Eyck portraits enter their final weeks, which puts two Netherlandish rooms in the building at once — one of them the most celebrated show of the decade, the other a small free display of a painter most visitors will never have heard of, and arguably the more surprising of the two.