Catarina van Hemessen

Caterina or Catharina van Hemessen (1528 – after 1565) was a Flemish Renaissance painter. She is the earliest female Flemish painter for whom there is verifiable extant work. She is mainly known for a series of small-scale portraits of women completed between the late 1540s and early 1550s as well as a few religious compositions.

Van Hemessen is often given the distinction of creating the first self-portrait of an artist depicted at an easel. Her self-portrait, created in 1548 at the age of 20, shows the artist holding a maulstick as she starts work on a painting. The image is in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Basel.

Other paintings by Van Hemessen are in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and in the National Gallery, London. Few women were able to become professional artists during the early modern period in western art, largely because they were denied access to artistic education, systems of mentorship, and professional organizations. Artistic training, which could involve both the dissection of cadavers and the study of the nude male figure, and systems of apprenticeship could require that an aspiring artist would need to live with an older artist for four to five years, often beginning from the age of nine to 15.

For these reasons, female artists were extremely rare, and those that did make it were typically trained by a close relative, as in Van Hemessen's case, by her father, Jan Sanders van Hemessen.