Portrait of a Young Woman

A young woman gazes outward with composed directness, her dark clothing and white collar rendered with the precise brushwork characteristic of Antwerp painting in the mid-sixteenth century. Catharina van Hemessen was one of the earliest known female painters in the Low Countries, and her father, Jan van Hemessen, was a leading figure in the Antwerp school. Her surviving portraits, though few, reveal a sensitivity to individual character that distinguishes her work from the more formulaic court portraiture of the period.