Catarina van Hemessen

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Self-Portrait van Hemessen (1548)

Catarina van Hemessen (* 1527/28 in Antwerp ; † after 1583 ) was a Flemish portrait painter of the Renaissance who worked in Antwerp. In addition to portraits, she also painted religious pictures.

life and work

Her father was the painter Jan Sanders van Hemessen (approx. 1500 – approx. 1566), who taught her painting until she was around 20 years old. She is considered the first Flemish artist with signed and dated paintings. This is all the more remarkable since the daughters and sons who worked in the family workshops rarely worked under their own names. In 1548 she made a self-portrait in three variations and thus created the earliest picture in which a painter is working. She signed her self-portrait with EGO CATERINA DE / HEMESSEN ME / PINXI 1548 / AETATIS / SVÆ / 20 - I, Catharina van Hemessen, painted myself in 1548 at the age of 20. One of her earliest masterpieces is the Girl at the Spinet (1548), which her sister Christina shows. Van Hemessen mainly devoted herself to painting portraits, mainly depicting women. Most of her small-format pictures were made between 1548 and 1554 and were sold at high prices.

Your realistic paintings always have a dark background. The people portrayed do not look at the viewer (except in the case of the self-portraits).

In 1554 she married the Antwerp organ player Chrétien de Morien. Two years after the wedding, she went to Spain with her husband .

As early as 1567 she was mentioned as a famous painter in a book about the Netherlands. One of her greatest patrons was Mary of Castile , Archduchess of Austria, Princess of Spain and Queen of Bohemia and Hungary. After her abdication as regent of the Netherlands, she invited van Hemessen to her court in Madrid . She established a foundation for the benefit of the couple van Hemessen and left the artist couple a generous pension after their death. The artist later returned to the Netherlands, and no works from her are known from this period after her return.

Works (selection)

literature

  • Christiane Weidemann, Petra Larass, Melanie Klier: 50 women artists you should know Prestel Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-7913-3957-3 , pp. 10–13
  • Marguerite Droz-Emmert: Catarina van Hemessen. Renaissance painter . 196 pp., Hardcover, Schwabe Verlag Basel 2004, ISBN 3-7965-2095-2 [6]
  • Seeing Ourselves: Women's Self-Portraits by Frances Borzello, p. 39
  • Whitney Chadwick: Women, Art and Society . Pp. 114-116
  • Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin (Eds.): Women Artists: 1550–1979 , Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Knopf, New York, 1976
  • Chadwick, Whitney: Women, Art, and Society , Thames and Hudson, London, 1990

Web links

Commons : Catarina van Hemessen  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

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personal data
SURNAME Hemessen, Catarina van
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Flemish portrait painter of the Renaissance
DATE OF BIRTH 1527 or 1528
PLACE OF BIRTH Antwerp
DATE OF DEATH after 1583