One Fine Show: ‘Michaelina Wautier, Painter’ at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

The last decade has seen curators and collectors seek to expand the canon as they find artists who had been, for whatever reason, overlooked in their time but add valuable, complicated texture to the narratives of art history. One of my favorite recent rediscoveries was the conceptual artist Pippa Gardner, who did great work around American car culture and enjoyed a plethora of gallery and museum shows shortly before she died this year. The world can take a long time to catch up with an artist’s work, but it’s always fortunate when it does before their passing, so they can enjoy that sensation of having been right.

A new exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna has reached far back and dug deep to offer a comprehensive collection of work by the forgotten Flemish Baroque painter Michaelina Wautier (c.1614-1689). “Michaelina Wautier, Painter” brings together around 80 high-caliber paintings and ephemera and places her work in conversation with contemporaries like Rubens and Van Dyck, whose work she would have likely known.

In fact, Wautier signed her works “Michaelina Wautier fecit,” Latin for “Michaelina Wautier made [this],” which would have had the culturally male association of professional training, a la “Petrus Paulus Rubens fecit,” whereas contemporary women tended to sign just their names. She lived in a townhouse in Brussels with her brother Charles, who was also a painter and perhaps the reason she may have received training. Only about thirty of her works are known today.

But each work is a feast. The Triumph of Bacchus (c.1655-59) depicts a literal one. It is her largest and considered by some to be her masterpiece. The god is carried surrounded by satyrs, surrounded by a procession of nudes, putti and revelers. Wautier is skilled at sensation. In this work, she has managed to convey the feeling of drinking in the afternoon, the too-bright sun disappearing into Bacchus’s love handles. An uptight woman looking at the viewer may be the artist herself, a reminder of the impending hangover. She works the nerves too with her Five Senses series from 1650, in which pale boys stimulate themselves in manners demonstrable and strange. In The Five Senses (Smell), the boy holds a rotten egg and his nose with a forlorn look.

We would be remiss not to highlight the artist’s proper self-portrait from around the same time as she was making The Senses. It differentiates itself from her other work by its rigidity. If the other works are generous to the viewer, this one seems to have little patience for them. This was a woman who created an unorthodox identity for herself through her discipline and talent. In this painting, she wants to get back to work.

“Michaelina Wautier, Painter” is on view at the Kunsthistorisches Museum through February 22, 2026.

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