Caterina van Hemessen - Self-portrait

• Title: Self-portrait (Selbstbildnis)
• Artist: Caterina van Hemessen (1527-1560)
• Date: 1548
• Medium: Tempera on oak wood
• Dimensions: 32 x 25 cm
• Location: Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland

As the artist wrote in Latin, “I, Caterina van Hemessen, painted myself in 1548, at the age of 20.”

Catharina van Hemessen is the earliest female Flemish painter for whom there is verifiable, existing work. She was a master in the Guild of Saint Luke in Antwerp which was the rare at the time for women, particularly because the system of apprenticeship meant that the aspiring artist would need to live for 4 to 5 years with a recognized master, typically older and male, often beginning in their early teens. This promiscuity meant that women would need to find a close relative to train them; for Catharina it was her dad. She is mainly known for a series of small-scale female portraits completed between the late 1540s and early 1550s and a few religious compositions.

This "Self-portrait" of 1548 is the first known self-portrait of an artist depicted seated at an easel. She holds a fine brush in one hand which is leaning against a mahlstick, a support painting rod. In the other hand she is holding on to the mahlstick, a palette and more brushes. Before this self-portrait, painters like Jan Van Eyck or Albrecht Dürer would tend to paint themselves as a gentleman or include themselves as one of the characters in a larger set, but not as a manual worker with tools. In this painting, Catharina van Hemessen is clad with a fine dress showing she is a respectable, bourgeois woman, but the act of painting is central to the painting showing she is craftswoman.