Catarina van Hemessen

Caterina or Catharina van Hemessen (1528 – after 1565) was a Flemish Renaissance painter. She is the earliest female Flemish painter for whom there is verifiable extant work. She is mainly known for a series of small-scale portraits of women completed between the late 1540s and early 1550s as well as a few religious compositions.

Van Hemessen is often given the distinction of creating the first self-portrait of an artist depicted at an easel. Her self-portrait, created in 1548 at the age of 20, shows the artist holding a maulstick as she starts work on a painting. The image is in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Basel. Other paintings by Van Hemessen are in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and in the National Gallery, London.

Few women were able to become professional artists during the early modern period in western art, largely because they were denied access to artistic education, systems of mentorship, and professional organizations. Artistic training, which could involve both the dissection of cadavers and the study of the nude male figure, and systems of apprenticeship could require that an aspiring artist would need to live with an older artist for four to five years, often beginning from the age of nine to 15. For these reasons, female artists were extremely rare, and those that did make it were typically trained by a close relative, as in Van Hemessen's case, by her father, Jan Sanders van Hemessen.

Life Van Hemessen was the daughter of Jan Sanders van Hemessen (c. 1500-after 1563), a prominent Mannerist painter in Antwerp who had studied in Italy. Her father is believed to have been her teacher and she likely collaborated with him on many of his paintings. It is now thought that some of her brothers, Hans, Gilles and Peter, might also have been artists, whilst other relatives worked as musicians. She became a master in the Guild of Saint Luke in Antwerp and was the teacher of three students.

A Lady in Sixteenth-Century Costume, c. 1548–1549. Bowes Museum, County Durham

Van Hemessen was a successful painter in her lifetime.

In her lifetime, she was mentioned by two Italian artist biographers, Lodovico Guicciardini in his Description of the Low Countries of 1567 and Giorgio Vasari in his Vite of 1568.

Van Hemessen died in 1565/68, possibly in childbirth. She portrayed ostensibly wealthy men and women often posed against a dark background. The delicate figures she painted have a graceful charm and are provided with stylish costumes and accessories. Also in 1548, she painted Woman At Virginals which may have been a portrait of her sister Christina. It is thought that her self portrait and the Woman At Virginals were a pair to be hung together.

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