The National Gallery in London will present in spring 2027 the first exhibition in the United Kingdom entirely devoted to the painter Catharina van Hemessen (1527/28 - after 1565), a Flemish Renaissance artist among the earliest documented in European art history. The exhibition, titled Catharina van Hemessen, will be open to the public from March 4 to May 30, 2027 in Room 1 (H.J. Hyams Hall).
The exhibition will bring together for the first time most of van Hemessen’s signed paintings from international collections, offering a unique opportunity to rediscover the work of a pioneering figure of the Flemish Renaissance.
The artist is best known for her small-format female portraits, created in the late 1640s and early 1650s. She is also the oldest artist in the National Gallery’s collection. She is one of only four female painters mentioned by Vasari and Guicciardini as active in Antwerp in the 16th century, and the only one whose indisputable body of work can be established. Daughter of Antwerp Mannerist painter Jan Sanders van Hemessen (c. 1500-after 1563), Catharina was probably trained in her father’s workshop, where she actively collaborated.
The exhibition, curated by Christine Seidel, associate curator of Renaissance painting at the National Gallery, is organized in collaboration with the Snijders&Rockoxhuis Museum in Antwerp. It is precisely at the Snijders&Rockoxhuis Museum that the exhibition Van Hemessen & Father: The Antwerp Workshop of Jan and Catharina van Hemessen, running from Oct. 15, 2026 to Jan. 31, 2027, explores the family and artistic context in which the painter was formed.
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| At the National Gallery in London, the first exhibition in the UK devoted to Flemish painter Catharina van Hemessen |
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