- Wilhelm Heinrich Campe (1771-1862)

- Therese Pauline Campe (1808-1886): wife of Heinrich Brockhaus (1804-1874)

- Remagen, Arp Museum Rolandseck, Maestras: Women Masters 1500–1900, 25 February 2024 – 16 June 2024

Michaelina Wautier was arguably the most talented female artist to live and work in the Southern Netherlands in the seventeenth century. Yet, she was only recently saved from total oblivion. What makes her unique is that she chose the human figure as her primary subject while most of her female colleagues focused on the ‘easier’ branches of art, still life or landscape. Moreover, Wautier was capable of painting enormous Rubensian compositions with life-size figures in action, such as the Bacchanal in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Michaelina’s singular approach to portraits renders her one of the most interesting portraitists of her era. None of her portraits are run-of-the-mill and each communicates the sitter’s presence in an extremely powerful way. Likenesses of real people are also featured in the genre pictures, tronies and histories by her hand. It is as if Wautier’s entire oeuvre one way or another revolves around portraits. Wautier’s exploration of the tenets of portraiture resulted in the creation of multi-layered images that intellectually challenge the viewer. This is especially manifest in her so-called portrait historiés, an intriguing subgenre of portraits in which the sitter takes on the guise of a figure from a historical, Biblical or mythological story and of which our painting is a splendid example. At first glance, we see a shepherd, but the inscription upper right carved in the rock - RACHEL. VAUT. BIEN / LA PEINE (Rachel is worth the effort) – identifies him as Jacob, the son of Isaac and Rebecca. Genesis 29 relates the well-known story of Laban and his two daughters: Leah and Rachel. Jacob met Rachel, a shepherdess tending her father’s flock and letting the animals drink from the well, upon arriving in Harran. When Jacob asked Rachel to marry him, Laban exclaimed that first his eldest daughter Leah had to wed and that Jacob would have to wait seven years before he could marry Rachel. After seven years Laban brought Leah to Jacob. When Jacob noticed that she was not Rachel, he again asked for her hand in marriage. This time, Laban gave his permission provided Jacob worked for him another seven years.

While the sitter’s real identity remains a mystery, it is clear he likened himself to the Old Testament Jacob, who waited so long before he could marry his ideal woman. Is our Jacob pointing with his index finger to his wife, painted in a now-lost companion piece? There is no early provenance and early sources mentioning our painting, let alone a pendant. Usually, in individual portraits of married couples the man’s likeness would be placed heraldically on the right (left for the viewer) and the woman’s heraldically on the left. This, however, is not an iron law and in the case of betrothal portraits the order is reversed. Usually, husband and wife or husband and wife-to-be exchange glances in companion pieces. Our Jacob addresses the viewer. One wonders whether this portrait was a gift for his ‘Rachel’ in a final effort to win her over. At any rate, the outstretched index finger remains a mysterious gesture.

Michaelina’s portrait is strongly reminiscent of the indeed paradigmatic portraits that Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) painted of the English aristocracy in the 1630s, many of which share a distinct pastoral flavour and employ a similar rocky backdrop. Van Dyck also portrayed some of his sitters as shepherds, two famous examples being his portrait of Philip, 4^th Lord Wharton (1613-1696) of 1632 in Washington (National Gallery of Art) and the portrait of Lord Stuart, Seigneur d’Aubigny (1618-1642) of around 1638 in London (National Portrait Gallery). Just as our portrait, these sport a rocky background and the sitter holds a shepherd’s houlette. No doubt Wautier knew numerous works by Van Dyck, even if she is unlikely to have seen the just-two mentioned ones. The only respect in which Wautier deviates from the Van Dyckian mode with its premium on flattering and idealizing the sitter is in her strikingly realistic record of the sitter’s face. It is this that imbues her portraits with such immediacy. 

Only a little over thirty works by Michaelina are known. A couple are also portrait historiés. A well-known example is her portrait of two girls as the saints Agnes and Dorothea in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Another is a very early portrait of a family in which the married couple are depicted as Isaac and Rebecca. This portrait is a recent discovery. This also applies to our portrait of Jacob, which has long been buried in private collections and now ranks as a significant addition to her oeuvre. The painting’s outstanding quality has long been recognized, though. In 1826, when it was with its first known owner, the entrepreneur, diplomat and collector Heinrich Wilhelm Campe, it was engraved and in this print the painting is attributed to no one less than Diego Velazquez (1599-1660). A decade later a new print was made, from which emerges that the painting had changed ownership. It had meanwhile passed to Campe’s son-in-law, the famous book dealer and publisher Heinrich Brockhaus. In 2020 the painting resurfaced as a work by Michaelina’s brother, Charles Wautier. It was the leading Michaelina Wautier scholar Professor Katlijne Van der Stighelen who corrected the attribution, putting Michaelina’s on the painting.

A highly respected painter in her time, very little is known of Michaelina Wautier’s life. She was baptised on 2 September 1604 in the Walloon town of Mons as the daughter of Charles Wautier, who had served as a page to the Count of Fuentes, viceroy of Naples, and his second wife Jeanne George. Wautier’s family was a prosperous one and had held numerous important positions in Mons since the fifteenth century. It is unknown with whom Michaelina was trained. It is possible she had learnt to paint at a later age from her brother Charles, who also was an artist. At some point in the 1630s or 1640s, Michaelina had moved to Brussels where she went living with Charles. Neither being married, they probably shared a studio as well. During the 1650s, Charles and Michaelina seem to have forged close connections with the Brussels court of the governor-general of the Netherlands, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, whose collection in the end included several works by Michaelina, which were probably painted on commission or at least bought directly from her.

Michaelina’s career had taken off by 1643. There is an engraving after a lost portrait by her of Andrea Cantelmo dated that year. By this time, she may have been painting for some years already, however. In addition to portraits (among which is a stunning and early self-portrait), Michaelina painted genre scenes, often with just one or two figures, that remind of Michael Sweerts and Jacob van Oost. In painting manner her works are strikingly similar to those by her brother. The most impressive part of her oeuvre are scenes with saints, biblical and mythological themes, executed in a grand and broad manner, and these are stylistically indebted to Sir Peter Paul, Rubens, Sir Anthony van Dyck and Theodoor van Loon. There are also two garlands of flowers, dated 1652, preserved by her hand (both in different private collections).