A Freedom of Vision

At the Royal Academy of Arts in London, one of the most significant rediscovery projects devoted to seventeenth-century European painting takes shape. The exhibition on Michaelina Wautier, scheduled for spring 2026, is the first major presentation in the United Kingdom dedicated to an artist long left on the margins of the canon, despite a level of quality and ambition that places her among the most original figures of the Flemish Baroque. Active in Brussels in the mid-seventeenth century, Wautier developed a pictorial practice of remarkable breadth for a woman of her time. Alongside portraits of strong psychological intensity, she tackled large-scale mythological and historical subjects, genre scenes and still lifes, moving with ease across fields then considered the preserve of male painters. The exhibition traces this versatility, showing that her work is not a marginal exception, but a fully conscious presence within the visual debates of her era. One of the central sections of the exhibition is devoted to the large mythological paintings, including the celebrated Triumph of Bacchus, a work striking for its compositional complexity and iconographic boldness, particularly in its treatment of the male nude. Shown alongside these works are portraits and allegorical cycles that reveal an extraordinary attention to faces, gestures and the relationships between figures, with a use of light and colour that openly engages with contemporary Flemish traditions. The London retrospective is organised in collaboration with the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and forms part of a broader process of critical reassessment that, in recent years, has brought Wautier’s work back to the attention of international scholarship. Many of her paintings had long been attributed to other artists or relegated to a secondary role. The exhibition helps clarify attributions, chronologies and contexts, restoring coherence to a limited but exceptionally high-quality body of work. Without resorting to celebratory or anachronistic readings, the Royal Academy exhibition offers a sober and rigorous reconsideration of Michaelina Wautier’s place in the history of art. What emerges is the portrait of an artist capable of engaging, with full autonomy, with the major themes and ambitions of European Baroque painting.