In 1993, an art historian walked into a museum storeroom in Vienna and came across a large painting that had slipped almost entirely from view. The picture was not recognised as an important work by a woman artist. Instead, it became the first clue in a search that would stretch across more than three decades. The artist was Michaelina Wautier, a 17th-century painter whose work had once attracted wealthy and influential patrons but was later misattributed, sometimes to male contemporaries and even to her own brother. Art historian Katlijne Van der Stighelen began tracing the scattered evidence, eventually uncovering clues to a missing series of paintings known as The Five Senses. In 2020, the five works resurfaced after years of uncertainty. By 2026, 33 years after that first encounter in storage, Wautier’s work had reached London’s Royal Academy, where the forgotten artist became the subject of a major exhibition.
How a 1993 museum discovery began the rediscovery of Michaelina Wautier
When Van der Stighelen encountered the large painting in Vienna in 1993, it was not being treated as the work of an important woman artist. The encounter instead raised a basic question about its authorship. Wautier had been a successful painter in her own lifetime, but later generations had not preserved a clear account of her output. Some of her paintings were attributed to male artists, while others became effectively anonymous.According to The Royal Academy, Van der Stighelen’s investigation describes how she continued evidence across European archives. One particularly useful clue came in the form of a blurred black-and-white photograph reproduced in a 1975 auction catalogue. It showed a boy playing a recorder and identified the work as part of an allegorical group representing the five senses. The series became one of the missing pieces in the effort to reconstruct Wautier’s career. The paintings were still unlocated when a major Wautier exhibition opened in 2018.
Why Michaelina Wautier stood apart from other female artists of her time
The difficulty in recovering Wautier’s reputation was tied partly to the position of women painters in 17th-century Europe. Female artists were often steered towards subjects such as portraits and still lifes, while the large historical, religious and mythological compositions that carried greater status were generally associated with male painters. Wautier did not stay within those boundaries.An artist who worked across history painting, altarpieces, mythology, everyday scenes, still lifes, portraits and head studies. She lived and worked in Brussels with her brother Charles, who was also a painter, and their financial interests in property gave them a degree of independence. Wautier was excluded from the Brussels Guild of Saint Luke because she was a woman, yet that exclusion did not prevent her from working with live models, producing large-scale paintings and tackling subjects that were unusual for female artists of her period. The KMSKA, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, describes her as an artist who pursued a path markedly different from the conventions of her time.Her Two Girls as Saint Agnes and Saint Dorothy illustrates the range of that practice. The life-sized painting combines portraiture with religious storytelling: two unidentified girls appear as the Christian martyrs Agnes and Dorothy. The work was once attributed to Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert before stylistic research established Wautier’s authorship in 2003.
Why the discovery of The Five Senses was a breakthrough for Michaelina Wautier’s legacy
The breakthrough involving The Five Senses came much later. In 2020, Van der Stighelen received a call from a director at Christie’s with news that the long-missing group had been located. The five paintings were sold privately that year to collectors Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, who pledged to leave the works to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The discovery transformed a decades-old search into a tangible body of work that could finally be examined together.The series consists of Smell, Taste, Sight, Touch and Hearing, all dated around 1650. The complete group will be in London in 2026, allowing visitors to see the works together rather than through old catalogue photographs and scattered records. The exhibition placed a particular focus on the process through which Wautier’s paintings were recovered, and her authorship reassessed. The project as the work of an “art detective”, reflecting the unusual route by which the paintings returned to public view.
How Michaelina Wautier’s paintings were finally restored to her name
Wautier’s restoration to the historical record has not depended on a single discovery. It has been built gradually through comparisons of paintings, archival research and the correction of earlier attributions. Her paintings were for centuries sometimes assigned to male contemporaries, including Jacob van Oost, or even to her brother Charles. That history helps explain why reconstructing her career has taken so long: the paintings survived in greater numbers than the recognition of their creator did.Her standing during her lifetime was considerably different. Wautier’s patrons included important figures at the Brussels court, and her work entered the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm alongside paintings by artists such as Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. Her monumental The Triumph of Bacchus, held by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, was painted on commission for the archduke. The rediscovery of that work became a major turning point in the renewed study of Wautier.The story therefore stretches well beyond the recovery of a single painting. It begins with an art historian noticing a forgotten work in 1993 and extends through more than three decades of investigation, culminating in Wautier’s work being shown at the Royal Academy in London in 2026. The Five Senses, once represented by a poor auction photograph and a trail that had gone cold, could finally be seen as a complete series. For an artist whose paintings had spent generations carrying other names, the return of her own name to them was perhaps the most significant part of the discovery.
