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.
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
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