The Female Hand

Editorial

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This special issue of Art Matters, our third, grew out of a session at the 2024 Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA) conference, held in Cambridge from 10 to 13 July 2024. That session, "Technical Art History: Material Stories – Object Itineraries," called for interdisciplinary work combining technical and contextual approaches to Netherlandish art, with a particular focus on the skill and status of female artists from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

 

Where the original call singled out female painters and their status, training, and skill, the papers that emerged move well beyond the painter's studio, into the workshops of goldsmiths and manuscript illuminators, and into the trade in artists' materials itself. That a session framed around female skill in painting should draw in work on so many other crafts is telling: it points to a broader reorientation now underway in the field exemplified by recent exhibitions such as ‘Michaelina Wautier (1604–1689): Glorifying a Forgotten Talent' in Antwerp (2018) and, 'Michaelina Wautier, Painter', in 2026, at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and the Royal Academy, London, as well as 'Unforgettable: Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600–1750' (National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C, September 2025–January 2026, and Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent, March–May 2026), which presented women artists and artisans across disciplines, many previously unknown.

 

Every study pairs close material or technical analysis with archival research. The guild rolls, inventories, and workshop documents that underpin our histories of early modern making were kept by institutions that rarely admitted women to master status, and a woman's hand tends to survive in these records only at the margins: named in passing, folded into a husband's or father's entry, or visible only through the object itself.

 

Hanne Schonkeren investigates the work of female goldsmiths and silversmiths in sixteenth-century Antwerp, where the Saint Eligius guild barred women from registering as masters. Drawing on rediscovered documents in Antwerp's city archive on the parelgaterambacht (the pearl-drillers' craft), she argues that pearl-drilling was largely women's work.

 

Louisa Smieska, Ruth Mullett and Brittany Rubin study an illuminated leaf from a fifteenth-century Dutch Book of Hours held at Cornell University Library. Using synchrotron X-ray fluorescence and diffraction, conventional X-ray fluorescence, and fibre-optic reflectance spectroscopy (FORS), they identify its pigments, among them lead-tin yellow and an unusual antimony-rich grey, and set these findings beside illuminated leaves attributed to the Convent of St Ursula in Delft.

 

Marleen Puyenbroek reattributes a seventeenth-century Rotterdam paint shop, moving its authorship from Abraham van Bubbeson to his wife, Ermptgen van Putten. Newly found archival sources, she argues, show that van Putten, not her husband, ran the business and prepared the paint herself.

 

Kirsten Derks, Koen Janssens, Katlijne Van der Stighelen and Geert Van der Snickt examine Michaelina Wautier's (c. 1614–1689) Flower Garland with Butterfly (1652), one of only two flower paintings known by her. Combining micro-X-ray fluorescence scanning (MA-XRF) with analysis of a paint cross-section, they read her materials and layer build-up for evidence of her training.

 

Across metalwork, manuscript illumination, the paint trade, and easel painting, the four studies recover women as makers whom the guild rolls and inventories left under-recorded. Where documents and the dominant art-historical narrative fall silent, the objects and their materials carry what evidence survives. It is precisely at this point, where the paper trail runs out, that technical art history has the most to offer. By bringing technical research and close contextual reading together rather than keeping them apart, it can recover makers that neither approach would find alone, and start to put a woman's hand back into the picture.

 

We thank our four talented young scholars for their excellent papers, and our reviewers for their generous and careful attention. We also take this opportunity to issue an open call for further contributions on the theme of the female hand, which we hope to add to this Special Issue in the future.

 

Paul J.C. van Laar, Erma Hermens, Petria Noble

 

Editors