Rewriting Art History: Women Artists From Antwerp to Amsterdam

Subscribe to our free art newsletter

Webform

I agree to be emailed

Rewriting Art History: Women Artists From Antwerp to Amsterdam

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF WOMEN IN THE ARTS, GIFT OF WALLACE AND WILHELMINA HOLLADAY.

Judith Leyster, The Concert, ca. 1633.

In the late 17th century, the wife of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I purchased, in the words of Dutch Golden Age painter and biographer Arnoldus Houbraken, “a sublime work consisting of flowers, arms, eagles, crowns, decorated in foliage, of woven silk in a rustic manner, for which more than four thousand guilders were given.” That was more than double the sum of money that Rembrandt was paid for his monumental painting The Night Watch (1642).

The creator of this “sublime work” of woven silk was a woman, Johanna Koerten, who became famous by raising traditional craft media—mainly embroidery and paper-cutting—to the level of fine art. “Had she totally committed herself to painting,” wrote Houbraken, “she would undoubtedly have gone far in that art. Led beyond this by richness of intellect, she put herself to the cutting of all sorts of objects from paper with scissors. And she succeeded so well in this that she made an eternal name for herself.”

Unfortunately, Koerten was dropped from art history not long after her biographer wrote these words, but he may turn out to have been right in the long run. Three of Koerten’s intricate, rarely seen paper-cut works are now on view in Washington, DC, in an exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), titled Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600–1750 (through January 11, 2026). This ambitious loan show, produced in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium, puts on view almost 150 works by 40 artists—including Rachel Ruysch, Judith Leyster, Clara Peeters, and Maria Sibylla Merian—rewriting art history and setting the record straight about women’s achievement in the visual arts during one of the greatest periods of European artistic creativity.

These women were not working in the shadows, unappreciated, in quarter-hours snatched from household labor. They were art stars, making good money and getting the credit they craved and deserved. Koerten received elite visitors including Tsar Peter the Great of Russia and the Elector Palatine Johann Wilhelm. Houbraken recounts, “A series of learned men, and the most excellent poets, have also praised her scissor art in Latin and German verses and assigned immortality to her name.” She was known as “the Minerva of the scissors”—a reference to the Greco-Roman goddess of wisdom who was also adept at weaving.

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF WOMEN IN THE ARTS, GIFT OF WALLACE AND WILHELMINA HOLLADAY. PHOTO BY LEE STALSWORTH.

Maria Sibylla Merian, Plate 29 from Dissertation in Insect Generations and Metamorphosis in Surinam, 2nd edition, 1719.

In more conventional media, Leyster hung out a shingle as a professional painter in the city of Haarlem, not far from Frans Hals’ studio (ironically, in later years, her paintings were misattributed to Hals). Leyster felt empowered enough to paint a self-portrait that depicts her as a successful artist, tools of the trade in hand, an expression of delighted pride on her face. Ruysch, a master of floral still life, commanded high prices for her lush, incredibly detailed works, which were considered by connoisseurs to be the best of the genre. Merian’s art was more scientific in nature; she carefully documented the natural objects found by Dutch explorers in the New World, a task carried on by her two daughters, Johanna and Dorothea.

Houbraken titled his massive biographical book The Great Theatre of Dutch Painters and Paintresses. “Paintresses” –just think of it! What was it that made this place and time so special in terms of acknowledgment of women’s artistic achievement? What made it an exception to the sorry rule that women must be marginalized and their work diminished? In her famous 1971 Art News essay, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?, Linda Nochlin wrote that the three main reasons “why” were (1) the definition of “greatness” favored men; (2) socio-economic conditions made it nearly impossible for women to gain the expertise and free time needed to launch and maintain an art career; and (3) the writers of art history chose to exclude or minimize those few women who did manage to succeed.

In Golden Age Holland, reason 2 (and to some extent 3) somehow didn’t obtain. It’s difficult to know for sure at a remove of four centuries, but it seems that family played a role, since many women artists were the daughters of painters (a factor noted by Nochlin in her essay over 50 years ago), and the Dutch took a guild-like, family-business approach to art. Dutch women were also bolstered by an anomalously equitable legal code relative to other European states at that time. Koerten, although self-taught and not helped by an artistic family, was loyally supported in her work by her husband, Adrian Blok. After her death, at his own expense, he published a book of poems by various writers in her honor, as a fitting memorial.

*This article originally appeared in Art & Object Magazine's Winter 2026 issue.

About the Author