The Dutch Golden Age had women in it all along. NMWA's new show makes that impossible to ignore.

The Dutch Golden Age had women in it all along. NMWA's new show makes that impossible to ignore.

Every art history student has heard of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals. The Dutch 17th century is practically its own brand. What most of those students were never told is that women ran workshops, sold work on the open market, received royal commissions, and trained their own pupils during the same period. The National Museum of Women in the Arts intends to fix that, starting this Friday.

Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600 to 1750 opens September 26 and runs through January 11, 2026, at NMWA's home at 1250 New York Avenue NW. It is the first exhibition to rewrite the art history of this era from the perspective of women artists. That sentence sounds like curatorial boilerplate. It is not. No survey of this scope, devoted specifically to multiple early modern Flemish and Dutch women, has existed before, at any museum, anywhere.

What's actually on the walls

The exhibition brings together nearly 150 artworks by 40 Dutch and Flemish women artists, including Gesina ter Borch, Maria Faydherbe, Judith Leyster, Maria van Oosterwijck, Magdalena van de Passe, Clara Peeters, Rachel Ruysch, Jeanne Vergouwen, and Michaelina Wautier. Some names are familiar to specialists. Many are not, and that gap is part of the story.

The show presents an array of paintings, lace, prints, paper cuttings, embroidery, and sculpture. That range matters. Art history has traditionally privileged oil on canvas. Lace-making in the Low Countries was among the most technically demanding and economically valuable work of the era, and the women who made it, often anonymously, were participating in the same artistic economy as painters with signatures and guild memberships. Women were involved in virtually every aspect of artistic production in the Low Countries during the 17th and early 18th centuries. During this period, colonial exploitation and the international slave trade enriched Europe's upper and middle classes, fueling demand for art and other luxuries. The exhibition does not look away from that context.

The Washington premiere features loaned works from more than 50 public institutions and private collections, including the Amsterdam Museum, Museum Gouda, and the Rijksmuseum. Add to that loans from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the National Gallery of Art here in Washington. A fair number of these works have never been shown in the United States before.

The curator behind it

Virginia Treanor, Ph.D., serves as senior curator at NMWA and holds a doctorate in 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art, which she earned at the University of Maryland. She has held positions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Gallery of Art. This is, in other words, a DC-rooted scholar putting years of specialized research directly onto the walls of a DC museum. Frederica van Dam, curator of old masters at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, co-curated the exhibition.

In the exhibition's catalogue, Treanor writes that many of the artists in the show "far from being dismissed, overlooked, [or] working in obscurity during their lifetimes, many women were acknowledged for their talents and contributions" and "consistently appear in records throughout the period, attesting to their undeniable presence." The problem, she argues, is what happened after: attribution errors, heirs who destroyed records, and a critical tradition that simply wasn't looking.

Judith Leyster (1609 to 1660), whose identity was rediscovered more than a century ago, is only now enjoying success at auction, as evidenced by the Currier Museum of Art's 2022 acquisition of Boy Holding Grapes and a Hat (ca. 1629). Rachel Ruysch, another figure in the show, had her first-ever major solo exhibition open in 2024 at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. These women are not obscure footnotes. They were prominent in their lifetimes. The scholarship that has restored their names is recent.

The market they worked in

One detail the exhibition makes vivid: the Low Countries had the first open art market in Europe, where finished paintings were sold off the shelf rather than commissioned to order. Painting for Antwerp's open market, Clara Peeters (ca. 1587 to after 1636) relied on skill and technique to reproduce her popular imagery quickly. She strategically repeated motifs across works, such as the carp in the center of Still Life of Fish and Cat (after 1620). Collectors appreciated the verisimilitude with which she depicted varied textures in her still lifes, a genre in which she was a pioneer.

One visitor that Johanna Koerten (1650 to 1715) welcomed to view her work was Tsar Peter the Great of Russia, an indication of her international reputation. Koerten created his portrait, as she did with many other illustrious people of the time, including King William III of England. Koerten worked primarily in paper-cutting. That medium alone disqualified her from serious art-historical attention for generations.

The options available to women artists in this period depended largely on their social class. For women of the Low Countries, opportunities for artistic advancement and independence varied greatly, largely based on family connections and socioeconomic status. The exhibition is organized to make those conditions legible, not as excuses for why women were marginal, but as evidence for why they were present in such numbers despite the structural constraints.

After Washington, it goes to Ghent

The exhibition is organized by NMWA in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium, and will travel to Ghent from March 7 through May 31, 2026. The DC installation and the Ghent installation are reportedly somewhat different in the works selected and the narrative emphasis, which makes the NMWA run the place to see the American-specific assembly of loans, including pieces from major US collections that won't make the transatlantic trip.

A significant catalogue, published in both Dutch and English, accompanies the exhibition. Edited by co-curators Treanor and van Dam, the 304-page volume features new research and perspectives by Treanor and van Dam as well as Klara Alen, Frima Fox Hofrichter, Elena Kanagy-Loux, Judith Noorman, Catherine Powell-Warren, Inez De Prekel, Marleen Puyenbroek, Oana Stan, and Katie Altizer Takata. It's available in the museum shop.

Plan your visit

Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600 to 1750 opens September 26 and runs through January 11, 2026. General admission is $16 for adults and $13 for DC residents. It is free for visitors 21 and under. NMWA sits at 1250 New York Avenue NW, a few blocks from Metro Center and Federal Triangle stations. Member programming, including curator-led tours with Virginia Treanor, is available through the museum's events calendar at nmwa.org.

Maria van Oosterwijck's Vanitas Still Life, one of two paintings flanking the exhibition's title banner, greets visitors at the entrance. It is not a minor work tucked into a corner. It is the first thing you see. That placement is intentional.

Sources

• NMWA: Official Exhibition Page, Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600 to 1750
• NMWA Press Release: "Landmark Exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts Reframes an Iconic Historical Era"
• NMWA Broad Strokes Blog: "Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam: Presence"
• NMWA Broad Strokes Blog: "Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam: Networks"
• NMWA Broad Strokes Blog: "Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam: Legacy"
• NMWA Events: Curator's Perspective with Virginia Treanor
• University of Maryland Department of Art History and Archaeology: exhibition notice
• ArtTable: Curator-Led Tour with Virginia Treanor
• Destination DC: Exhibition listing and visitor details