Tschabalala Self's 'Lady in Blue': Beryl Cook for the Twenty-first Century

Tschabalala Self, Lady in Blue, Trafalgar Square, London

Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth sculptures are supposed to excite comment. There is no point going to the trouble and expense of competition and rotation if they are put up and then ignored. Tschabalala Self's recently installed Lady in Blue has attracted a range of reviews - two stars from the Telegraph, four from the Times - but also a particular and insidious brand of criticism. Opposition to a global majority Everywoman was perhaps sadly only to be expected. Self had previously seen her work Seated daubed in white paint after it was unveiled at Bexhill on Sea in 2023, although the subsequent wave of volunteers who came forward to clean it suggests there was at least as much positivity.

Self's Trafalgar figure is a similarly oversized bronze, strikingly polychromatic, curvaceously cuddly, with a determination to be seen and heard. Much of the - largely male - criticism has indeed centred on her physique, ranging from Waldemar Januszczak's scathing and overtly provocative 'Mammy Two Shoes' (Tom and Jerry) comparison, to Jonathan Jones' four star salivation over 'the lady's generous proportions...fetishistic power...and commanding girth.' In a world which has largely got beyond body shaming, it is beyond tiresome that size, particularly of breasts and buttocks, particularly of a Black woman, seems so obsessed over. There are disturbing echoes of Hottentot Venus sexualised caricatures. 

The second bone of contention is her dynamic 'striding' posture, arms swinging, away from the National Gallery and across the square to the city beyond. Perhaps she is literally leaving the gallery, bringing its art into the world and up to date. Her propulsive pose is not what one might describe as conventionally feminine - the pace is too long, the movement too decisive -yet echoed references to art of the past abound. Umberto Boccioni's 1913 Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, an attempt to convey Futurist dynamism in three dimensions, is assumed male but in reality androgynous. It is at least partly inspired by the female Winged Victory of Samothrace, well over two thousand years old. And what of Vera Mukhina's Soviet workers? Self's smartly dressed city-goer might be read as a playful, plasticky capitalist response, undermining earnestly heroic civic sculpture of a communist bent along with its riposte to the static, plain and dead male dignitaries who surround it in Trafalgar Square. 

Vera Mukhina, Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, 1937

Lady in Blue is anchored to artistic tradition as firmly as to the fourth plinth, from the heavyweight choice of bronze (aesthetically unnecessary given the painted surface), to the use of colour itself. We have never quite got over Winckelmann's gaslighting about classical, white purity and painted statues have an end-of-pier tawdriness about them. Here, the blue is deliberate: lapis, the expensive pigment of the Virgin, of heaven itself; the colour of a hundred paintings in the National Gallery. Yet this 'lady' in blue, surely a nod to Chris de Burgh, is neither holy nor virginal. Nor is she titled, like so many of the portraits in the building behind her. 

Patrick West bemusedly complains in the Spectator that Lady in Blue 'inanely celebrates merely being black and being a woman' as if this is a completely incomprehensible idea. Yet, Self is simply reviewing a long cultural legacy through the lens of her own lived experience. As a figurative version of one of Claes Oldenburg's oversized ice-cream cones or a sculptural reinterpretation of a Warhol, her sculpture might be seen as little more than Pop revisited. You might argue it is simplistic, but it is hardly controversial. 

The many platitudinous pronouncements about 'our shared present' and 'collective future' are also missing the point.  Ironically, Self's work was unveiled on Beryl Cook's one hundredth birthday and this summer's critically acclaimed centenary show in Plymouth saw that artist finally recognised as more than just a folksy riff on Carry-On nostalgia. Stylistically, Lady in Blue is the successor to Cook's subversive exuberance, proof that caricature can be affectionate as well as cruel and that serious commentary on class, gender and society can be made with smile. Is it the scale of the sculpture which has tipped critics over the edge, or is it the very beautifully patinated skin colour? Self's work might not be to everyone's taste, but its strident, striding, don't-give-a-shit joyfulness is undeniable. Female bodies do not have to be sexualised. Women are allowed to take up space. And art does not have to be serious.

Reflections (Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum until January 3 2027)

Claude Monet, Bateaux en Hollande, près de Zaandam, 1871, Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea

Reflections takes its cue from the mighty river Severn which runs through Worcester, already referenced on the way into the exhibition by William Calder Marshall's magnificently absurd 1880 sculpture Sabrina Being Thrown into the River Severn. This is a show loosely dedicated to the theme of water, curated by artists Jonathan Wright and Wayne Warren and bringing together works from Worcester's own collection, other public galleries and private collections. You can't fault the commitment of a venue which refuses to be constrained by its tiny two room exhibition space and this is a thrillingly eclectic collection of works ranging from nineteenth century academic populism to contemporary installations, and featuring photography and ceramics as well as painting. Yes, you can argue that cramming such a range of examples into so small a space creates a disjointed bittiness, but that is unkind given the depth of the ambition. What the exhibition does prove beyond doubt is that thematic shows, which are rarely favoured by the big national collections, have an intrinsic interest and across-the-board appeal. There is aesthetically something for everyone and every visitor will have their own appreciation of the theme, whether that is nostalgic fishing, news-worthy floods, environmental concerns of symbolic cleanliness.

The exhibition starts with a misleading and slightly humorous teaser: William Etty is at the kitsch end of Victorian art and his two boating cherubs here are saccharinely cutesy. Enter the gallery space and the show proper dives into nineteenth century naturalism as seen through the academic eyes of Benjamin Williams Leader, local lad and wildly popular in his day, and proto-Impressionists like Jean Baptiste Camille Corot and Charles-François Daubigny. Worcester have secured a number of National Gallery loans for this exhibitions, alongside an early Monet from Glynn Vivian in Swansea. The wall of watery landscapes tells a great story of the development of landscape from the 1850s, although one perhaps misses a full blown Impressionist example. 

Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, A Flood, c.1870-5, National Gallery, London

The opposite wall takes the story into the twentieth century with a collection of British works, starting with the gallery's very own blockbuster: Alexander Stanhope Forbes' Chadding on Mount's Bay is consistently their most popular painting and it is easy to see why with its combination of narrative complexity and breezily sunny nostalgia. From there you have a  who's who of post-War British art: Patrick Heron, David Hockney, Wilhelmina Barnes Graham. Apart from introductory wall texts, the labelling is minimal and the theme is getting swamped by the art. This is not a criticism: Derek Jarman's luscious blue print could be summer sky as much as ocean but either way you want to drown in it. There is a terrible poignancy to Hockney's swimming pool, teaming with ripples which look like newly hatched tadpoles joyfully setting out on the start of their life. 

The second smaller room is a smorgasbord of objects and images, chosen by the artist-curators and including their own work. There is a panel of flood photographs; a glowing neon light installation; textual art; ceramics and I could easily have enjoyed a soundscape as well. The effect is thought-provoking rather than artistically coherent but acts as a palette-cleanser between the two more conventional displays. It provides the subtext to the exhibition title - this is not just about reflections on water but an invitation to make time for your own reflections, wherever they may take you. Once again, Worcester Art Gallery has punched above its weight and provided a small gem of a show.

Andy Warhol Art Star (Wolverhampton Art Gallery until October 4 2026)

Andy Warhol, Campbells Soup, 1968, Wolverhampton Art Gallery (©Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts)

Andy Warhol is too famous. Everyone thinks they know his work, and him, to the point that it is very easy to simply stop looking and engaging. To this end, I nearly did not bother to go to Wolverhampton Art Gallery, to see that I thought would be an exhibition of second-string prints. This is a cautionary tale which proves that art, all art, is best viewed in person and if you ever get the chance to go and look for yourself, grab it. Artist Rooms is a wonderful initiative from Tate and National Galleries Scotland which allows regional collections to access a stock of prints and drawings and in this case they are working with a collection which is renowned for its own, mainly British, Pop Art holdings. The resulting exhibition is bigger, fresher and more enlightening than I had possibly imagined.

Wolverhampton provides an excellent home-grown, warm-up act with a separate display of their own Pop holdings. From a clever rejigging of Cubism by Roy Lichtenstein, to a classic Bridget Riley and the psychedelically bright Longue March, this room is the Sixties objectified. The display area, dark walled and less cool than severely air conditioned, is too dingy to really showcase the vibrancy of the works but they twist and shout regardless. Pop is often dismissed as bubblegum art, unthinking and as disposable as the culture it was commenting on, yet nothing could be further from the truth. From the luridly violent slashes across Allan Jones' table-dancing dummy to Jim Rosenquist's anti-war F-111 these works have complexity as well as colour. And there is a subliminal boast from the Wolverhampton curators too: they have their own Warhol of Jackie Kennedy included here. Artist Rooms loans are a bonus, not a necessity.

Andy Warhol, Liz, 1965, National Galleries of Scotland (©Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts)

In fact, the gallery's second Warhol - Campbells Soup - opens the Artists Rooms display, part of a run of advert-inspired prints which lull you into thinking you know what you are about to get. Look again and the flash brashness of the billboard is undercut by the fragile ephemerality of the print paper and the handmade glitches. Almost immediately, the tone shifts further with a series of Warhol film posters, a combination of seventies post-hippy glamour and unsettling sleaze. Warhol's difficult relationship with feminism - his shooting by an activist is repeatedly referenced - and women in general, cuts through much of the show. But the unease is broader and permeates most of the exhibits, in the monumentalised pistols and electric chair repeats.  It is at its most acute in the angsty, faux-disguised self-portraits of a man who seems to both seek out and cower from his fame.

Scale and colour are repeated, some might argue overused, tropes but one might say the same about a lot of artists throughout history. Here the scale is supersized Americana, the colour the simplified blocks of machine printing and the impact is undeniable. Marilyn's frozen smile in lurid negatives, so familiar yet still able to pack a punch - endless manipulation, endlessly unnatural, all surface because no one was interested in the depth. Sometimes the message is delivered with brutal crudeness - Mao undercut by lipstick, Ali with stand-out colour fists, but these big screen prints have subtlety too - slowly disintegrating before our eyes as the ink bleeds and the shadows close in. Equally, there are drawings, delicately elegant nameless young men sniffing flowers like fin de siecle dandies, Mick Jagger so androgynous you have to look twice, Robert Mapplethorpe caught rabbit-like in the headlights. A wonderful, poignant image of a young Hockney was traced from a projection on a wall, a method which captures his mercurial enthusiasm for innovation as much as the physical likeness. 

The scale ramps up further in the last two rooms. Abstracted camouflage wallpaper doing exactly the opposite of what it was supposed to. Missile bases and paratrooper boots stripped back to monochrome, chillingly cartoonish. The Cold War is as ever present as seediness in the flipside of the American Dream. Big Brother is always on your shoulder. The exhibition's title suggests a bit of frivolity, but maybe the curators intend Art Star to be as double-edged as most of the works on show. If you thought you knew Andy Warhol, go to Wolverhampton and think again.

The Hay Wain: Walking Constable's Landscape (Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich until October 4 2026): Familiarity doesn't always breed contempt

John Constable, A Hayfield at East Bergholt, 1812, V and A Museum

The beautifully simple premise behind Ipswich Museum's 250 anniversary show is to eschew chronology in favour of geography. Although the exhibition focuses on works from the early part of Constable's career, it happily flits across time in order to remain rooted in space and take the viewer on a walk which starts at the artist's childhood home in East Bergholt and continues past Flatford Mill towards Dedham. The added joy, of course, is that you can exit the gallery and take the very same journey in reality through what is now marketed as Constable Country (and which, as quoted in the show, was already known as such during the artist's own lifetime). Constable is not getting quite the splash which greeted Turner's equivalent birthday last year: there are plenty of little exhibitions around but you have to seek them out. Suffolk, however, is gleefully celebrating their local lad and this is the central of three shows throughout the year. There is the added kudos of the borrowed Hay Wain, but even without that, there was a sense of excitement and bustle in the room. You sense that John Constable matters round here.

The full majesty of the Hay Wain, which can easily be overlooked within its normal National Gallery home, is wonderfully showcased in this more domestic setting. The shock of scale after a line of genteel watercolours and oil sketches gives a sense of the impact it must have made in the 1820s, particularly of course in Paris which embraced it in a way the Royal Academy did not. Its immersiveness, however, is not about size, so much as life. Constable's white dashes, later reduced in impact to become over-exaggerated 'snow', here create a sparkle of moisture and movement which you can almost hear as well as see in the flow of the river and the ripple of the leaves. The colour zings with sappy vibrance, all the more striking after the parched grass and premature autumnal leaves of the park outside. Everywhere is activity and interaction, from the much reused figures in the foreground, to the tiniest background dots half submerged in nature as they go about their tasks. 

John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821, National Gallery, London

Even behind its protective glass, this is a painting which draws you in and carries you away, to  those half-remembered, half-imagined perfect summer days. What is so clever, though, is the way that its nostalgic grandeur is both reinforced and undermined by the smaller surrounding works. The scene itself was one revisited and repainted by Constable many, many times; explored in all seasons, at all times of day, familiar to the artist in a way it is hard to underestimate. These oil sketches have an honesty and an ordinariness which makes the Hay Wain look like the showy crowd-pleaser it was intended to be. Constable gets criticised for inauthenticity by the very people who praise Turner for exaggerating sun and storm. Worse, he is accused of gentrifying the countryside as if he could not see it but through the rose-tint of his class. Both miss the point. Constable could do reality but he knew that reality would not work on academy walls, and would not pay the bills.

Before all that, we begin in East Bergholt, with three drawings done as a wedding present for a family friend and the two wonderfully prosaic views of the Constable family's garden, painted for personal pleasure and kept by the artist throughout his life. Two small sunsets washed with a pinkish-purple haze are as lyrical as poems, their colour as intense as anything Turner produced. Views of East Bergholt church might also be seen through the lens of elegiac romanticism. But there is reality here also: Fen Lane with the harvesters working or the casual glimpse of  a boy taking a drink which will later be reused with iconic effect in the Cornfield. Constable's determined observation led him to paint Boat Building entirely outdoors, and it remains a uniquely un-idealised record of rural-industrial labour.

The exhibition allows itself a couple of digressions. Cloud studies from Hampstead are included as they surely must be in any Constable show; and there are a handful of drawings, enough to remind us that he did travel elsewhere (Weymouth, Brighton). Generally, however, the curators follow their self imposed rules and we journey sedately through Dedham Vale, past Glebe Farm, Langham, the Coombs. There are surprises - a Valley Scene near East Bergholt is dense and green with trees - but the pleasure really lies in the familiarity. By the end of the show you recognise St Mary's Church or Dedham Lock as old friends, and (rather as in Gwen John's work currently on show in Edinburgh) the repetition highlights subtle differences rather than mundane similarity. You leave with a spring in your step, breathing fresh air and reminded of the simple joys of the English countryside. Bliss. 

Zurbaran (National Gallery until August 23 2026): Perfection in a Piece of Cloth

Francisco de Zurbaran, The Martydom of St Serapion, 1628,
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford Connecticut

Francisco de Zurbaran is often described as a Spanish Caravaggio, and anyone familiar with his moodily gothic St Francis, part of the National Gallery's permanent collection, will probably understand the comparison. However, if you go to Trafalgar Square expecting high drama and cinematic emotion, you will be disappointed. Zurbaran is a quiet, thoughtful painter. He wants to wow you with a fold of drapery or a piece of fruit rather than a gruesome death or sexy vanitas. He is also defiantly Spanish, able to channel Murillo's pretty sentimentality as much as Velazquez realism. We are, I think, programmed to respond to the Italian Baroque with its grand gesture and heavy chiaroscuro and in-your-face gutsiness, but by the time you leave the Zurbaran show, you realise the strength of simplicity and silence.

I almost wish I had begun at the end. The room of still lifes, padded out though it is with works by Zurbaran's son Juan who died tragically young of the plague, explains Francisco's whole approach. Objects are given space and reverence: a white cup of water, a line of jars, a pile of lemons. There is precision, to be sure, in the beautifully rendered citrus skin and perfect pewter reflections, but Zurbaran goes beyond draughtsmanship skill. He conveys the essence, the presence, the very soul of these everyday objects, so that they become emblems of God's creation. 

Rewind to the opening crucifixion and the same loving attention is given to the Christ's loincloth, so voluminous and complex that it defies the reality of the dying figure, to become the pure, flowing embodiment of living faith. It is difficult to tear your eyes away and look at the rest of the figure, sculptural against its almost black background. This is not Christ in agony. The feet rest almost comfortably on a horizontal shelf, the blood is a token trickle, the limbs have none of the contortion and strain you might expect, the face is impassive. Seville preferred such restraint in their painting, restricting high emotion to the lurid polychromatic sculptures which were paraded through the streets on feast days . 

There are a succession of such crucifixions, the best saved till last. The exhibition ends with an extraordinary, possibly unique, image of an artist at the foot of the cross. Perhaps it is St Luke, patron saint of painters, but it is impossible not to speculate that it is Zurbaran himself, producing his work, experiencing a vision. The figure is obviously a portrait of an individual: bald and gaunt, it has a monkish quality. The cross is off-centre, drawing the gaze to the space between the figures and the palette offered up by the artist, its daubs of pigment bright as beacons in the dark. Like the still lifes which have come before, it is an object imbued with extraordinary significance but in this case you can understand exactly what it means to the man who wielded it. 

Zurbaran is at his best when he gives his figures space. The exhibition has two of the twelve  Jacob and his Sons from the Bishops Palace at Bishop Auckland. Elaborately dressed, richly toned giants, they stride across undersized, tokenist landscapes, weighty in every sense. Even as a pair they have a sonorous ring, but I urge everyone to go to County Durham and see them in their full magnificence. St Casida wears a similarly elaborate costume more lightly, a Spanish lady out for a stroll, so that anyone ignorant of her story (food for Christian prisoners transformed into roses) might miss the religion altogether. 

Francisco de Zurbaran, The Young Virgin, 1632-3, Metropolitan Museum of Art

It is the big group set pieces which seem less assured. Figures interact awkwardly or not at all; spatial inconsistences and stagey backgrounds lead to an odd imbalance between observed precision and an overall lack of believability. Therein lies the problem: Zurbaran's art is driven by faith and if you do not share his (or his patrons') belief, the figures and the narratives they tell can seem at best clunky, at worst odd. It is difference between The Young Virgin and the same figure posed with her family.  The former, tiny and fragile yet old beyond her years, is surrounded by carefully chosen symbols in curtain-draped, icon-like isolation, the latter is somehow diluted by the mundane details of her home. Zurbaran's iterations of the Immaculate Conception with their Murillo-esque heavenly palette and a proliferation of creepily disembodied cherub heads left me completely cold. And then there are the Labours of Hercules, a rougher, more muscular, almost Italianate Zurbaran, which, together with the truly extraordinary Colossal Head, suggest there was perhaps another artist trying to get out. 

What stays with you, however, is Zurbaran's utter conviction. Even if you cannot share his faith (and although we know nothing about his religious views I find it impossible to believe he could paint like this without a deep faith), you can appreciate his certainty. High drama becomes unnecessary when every piece of God's creation matters. St Serapion's tortured martydom is utterly gratuitous when you can meditate on the shadowy folds of a white habit, an abstracted version of St Veronica's cloth which appears later in the show. You don't need to show Christ in agony when you can produce perhaps the most unsentimentally poignant image in Western art,  Zurbaran was not a Spanish Caravaggio: at his best, he was much much more.

James McNeill Whistler (Tate Britain until September 27 2026)

James McNeill Whistler, The Artist in his Studio, c.1665-6 Chicago Institute of Art

Whistler can be as difficult to pin down as the butterfly he adopted in his monogram. It makes him fascinating and frustrating in equal measure and the same could be said of Tate's once in a generation exhibition. It begins with a painting, a larger than life reproduction of the same painting and a mirror. Too tricksy by half. A pet annoyance of mine is the use of large scale reproductions in big, expensively priced shows when you've paid to see the real thing. If your pulling power is not sufficient to get a particular work then find a substitute (the Peacock Room recreation here is an exception). If you can’t make original artworks sufficiently interesting as a curator then you're in the wrong job. At best it looks like a gimmicky space filler, at worst it appears lazy. Here, with the original hanging alongside, it is just bewildering. You can make a strong case that Artist in his Studio is Whistler 101 and I’ve heard Carol Jacobi do this very effectively: him at his easel, models including one in white, Japanese objects, vacant mirror, all riffing off Velazquez but translucent, inconsequential and uncertain. The painting says it all so why is it not allowed just to speak.

A disorientating first room also tosses aside two great early portraits: Effie Deans and Maud Franklin. Their scale is grand manner, their palette muddy, the figures twist towards us emerging reluctantly from the gloom. Here they mean very little: I wanted to carry them to the end of the show and set them up up alongside a wall of great later figures, including Lady Archibald Campbell. One of the striking things about Whistler is that he remains remarkably consistent as an artist, something which the relentless chronology of the exhibition does not illustrate. 

Paint dribbles down the canvas in his view of Maud Franklin. Whistler's brushes and palette are in vitrines to the side. The curators justifiably want to make a lot of his innovative technique, no underpainting, liquid pigments, scraping back. The points are much repeated but never with quite enough clarity. When it comes to  printmaking the labels simply give up: you need to be something of an expert to separate lithography and lithotints. There are two intrusive and theatrical audios during the show but a simple video illustrating Whistler's technique might have been much more effective.

James McNeill Whistler, Brown and Silver Old Battersea Bridge, c.1859-63, 

Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts

After a lot of early faffing we get Whistler in Paris and making his first Dutch / Realist inspired works, small, tentative, mostly still prints. One of the great unanswered questions is how an artist so interested in line in could simultaneously be so obsessed with avoiding it in painting. His etchings are vividly evocative, bursting with life, energised by detail but also rooted in the past. This is an exhibition heavy on prints, perhaps too much so, but in the early stages, before visual fatigue starts to set in, they are a dynamic presence.

There's a convenient narrative that Whistler begins as a realist, influenced by the likes of Gustave Courbet, whom he painted with in Normandy, but it is difficult and ultimately rather fruitless to impose that kind of chronology. The Last of Old Westminster Bridge and Brown and Silver, Old Battersea Bridge are poles apart works from the early 1860s: the former prefigures Monet's Waterloo Bridge series with its bustling activity, whilst the latter blurs life into the misted horizontal brushstrokes of the Nocturnes. Does Whistler develop or does he just struggle to find a reconciliation between beauty and life? 

In a room of glorious Nocturnes that sense of harmony is achieved. Never mind the high farce of the Ruskin libel - which barely merits a mention - and regardless of the, admittedly fascinating, in-depth analysis that reveals Whistler as an artist of precision and control, repainting his firework sparks to find the perfect balance - these works have a perfect poetry which is like a sigh of contentment. But there is an aching sadness too, for Whistler's self-destruct button which had already cost him his biggest patron, Leyland, would lead to bankruptcy, homelessness and effective exile. 

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, Portrait of the Artist's Mother, 1871, Musée d'Orsay, Paris 

The big names are here: Tate's own Symphony in White Number Two and Miss Cicely Alexander, Wapping, At the Piano, and of course Arrangement in Grey and Black Number One. Whistler's Mother is given star billing, flanked by a guard of honour of two portraits and with a bench placed in front for those who want to pay extended homage. It is worth taking a seat: overfamiliar this might be, but it is a tremendous portrait, the bottom left is in itself worth the price of admission with the canvas weave emphasising verticality in tension with the edging of the rug. And that tension hangs in exquisite balance in everywhere. The only obvious omission in what is a weighty show, is Falling Rocket, but what is really lacking is a sense of context. Whistler knew anyone and everyone, and fell out with most, but although names are dropped and occasional associations made, there is very little sense of the cultural, cosmopolitan world in which he moved.

There is inevitably a downbeat feel to the tiny tentative Venice works produced after Whistler was thrown a lifeline commission to produce a print series in the city, but Whistler was incapable of being down and out for too long. His final fame-drenched phase, as performer, theorist, teacher, society portraitist is a glorious reaffirmation which does not really get the celebration it deserves. Partly perhaps it is a result to his palette increasingly dominated by low key browns, partly because the exhibition has failed to carry through the ebbs and flows of his career. Perhaps the lack of focus here is deliberate; perhaps you are meant to leave feeling ambivalent about Whistler the man and unsure about his art. Perhaps, however, it is a failure of nerve. Despite its edgy opening, this is a conventional, chronological show about an artist who did his best to defy convention at every turn. 

Michaelina Wautier (Royal Academy until June 21 2026)

Michaelina Wautier, St John the Evangelist, c.1650-9, Parity Project

It is rare and marvellous to go to an exhibition and be truly astonished. In three rooms at the Royal Academy, Michaelina Wautier blew me away. The rediscovery of women artists has become a pretty commonplace occurrence: since the National Gallery brought us Artemisia Gentileschi during the depths of Covid, we've had Lavinia Fontana in Dublin, Rachel Ruysch touring Europe, to name a few. In most cases, one has a vague sense of the artist involved, but Michaelina Wautier has literally appeared out of nowhere. She will perhaps never reach the popular heights of Gentileschi - there are fewer works, less provocative subject matter and no dramatic biography. But purely in terms of paint on canvas, she is head and shoulders above the rest.

We know virtually nothing about Wautier. Her life is largely a mystery, her training unrecorded, her later years a blank. The works which exist come from a limited time period of about ten years. The anchor is her brother Charles, a fellow artist and collaborator, who shared a studio, but who, on the evidence of the works here, was less talented as a painter. Without Charles, one might speculate, Wautier herself might never have practiced, never have achieved the commissions and success and independence. He provided respectability without the ties and responsibility which marriage would have carried (one thinks of Judith Leyster who effectively gave up her career after her wedding). Wautier also had a good patron, here represented in a Daniel Teniers portrait which seems especially chosen to show how average painters could be. Archduke Leopold was clearly a big fan and again, perhaps without his backing she might never have been able to paint the range and scale of subjects which she did. 

For the extraordinary thing about Wautier is that, at a time when women artists were not as  uncommon as we sometimes like to think, but were largely restricted to floral and still life subjects, she consistently broke the mould. There are two of her flower paintings in the show, paltry things, as if she is going through the motions. Wautier had bigger fish to fry: portraiture, religion and mythology. Even when she turned her hand to more female-friendly genre subjects, she went her own way: the Five Senses are big-eyed, curly-locked, elegant boys, not cheeky lads, not pretty girls. They live and breath on the canvas, rounded individuals with wild hair and expressive hands - two Wautier characteristics - who bring humour, pathos and energy.

From the freshly-scrubbed girlishness of Mary, wide-eyed and eager with her book in the Education of the Virgin to the well-worn wrinkles of her St Joseph and St Joachim, Wautier paints real, believable people. They are brought alive by brushwork which ripples across the canvas, not showily virtuoso in an Hals-ian way but naturally energised as if caught in the act of almost-movement. She has a knack with gesture and angled poses which add to that sense of casual immediacy.  St John the Evangelist, intense in his emotion and unconventional in his looks, epitomises her ability to create a narrative and psychological hinterland. Cropped, against a dark background, his one visible eye shines with passionate, hopeless devotion, his long fingers cradling the chalice with tender passion.

Michaelina Wautier, Self Portrait, c.1650, private collection

It is extraordinary how quickly Wautier gets there. The first room of portraits, including that of herself, are quietly impressive but unspectacular. She comes across as coolly competent, with her unprimed canvas and limited palette. The fabric of her Sunday best dress is beautifully rendered, her features starkly lit as she stares off into the distance: she hold sup well against the Rubens next door but it is all a little safe. The early Portrait of a Military Commander has more depth of character. The crumpled features of a well-lived life could have been painted by William Dobson, but there is wariness and weariness too in that intensely illuminated face. 

The show ends too soon, with the Triumph of Bacchus, big and bold and full of ebullient good humour. The central figure, all flesh, indolence and absurdity in his wheelbarrow chariot is one of the great representations of the god. I am not fully convinced about her presence in the form the bare-breasted figure of the right. Would Wautier really show herself like that, suffering some lecherous fondling as she looks out with a 'we've all been there girls' look. I think there might be some wishful thinking among art historians brought up on #MeToo and Gentileschi. Does it matter? This is a triumph of a painting by any standards, and a triumph of a show