There is only one Baroque woman sculptor by whom signed sculptures have been preserved. She was Maria Faydherbe, she was Catholic, and three of her works are now on display in an eye-opening exhibition of women artists who worked in Amsterdam and Antwerp at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington.
Chances are, you have not heard of Maria Faydherbe. Nor of Maria de Grebber, Johana Vergouwen, Susanna Verbruggen, Maria Theresia van Thielen, or Princess Louise Hollandine. These artists, like others who surprise us with their imagination and skill, crafted their paintings, sculptures, laces and engravings in the great cities that are now part of Belgium and the Netherlands during the seventeenth century.
They were all women. They faced huge obstacles, including a bias that has kept many of them from the acclaim they deserve. And this particular group were all Catholic. If you lived in the northern Netherlands, where the official religion was the Dutch Reformed Church, that was another hurdle for a Catholic artist, since Catholics were not allowed to worship in public even though official persecution had ceased.
Maria Faydherbe was born in 1587 to a brewer’s family in Mechelen, which was part of the Spanish Netherlands and the capital of the Roman Catholic Church in the region. While most of the rare female artists at the time stuck to portraiture and still-life paintings, Maria took up the vocation of two of her older brothers and became a sculptor, working in wood, stone and terracotta.
Not admitted to the Artists’ Guild, Maria probably had much of her work signed by her brothers. The Washington exhibit includes three small pieces by her. One is a masterfully carved Christ in boxwood from a crucifix (the cross has been lost) where she signed it on the back of the loincloth. The other two are images of the Madonna and Child, one in alabaster and one in boxwood.
In 1632 Maria showed her spunk in standing up to the men in the Mechelen artist’s Guild. She declared before the aldermen of the city that she was every bit as good a “master of sculpture” and in no way inferior to the guildsmen. Less than two weeks later, she dismissed them as “hack workers” turning out simple wooden figurines for the mass market. The case may have come up as she was defending her commission for a life-size marble statue of the Virgin Mary and Christ Child that still stands in the Jesuit church in Mechelen.
Getting to know Faydherbe is just one draw for visitors to the NMWA between now and Jan. 11, 2026, when “Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam” will close. The stars of the show are Judith Leyster, a Haarlem artist whose portraits were once confused with the more famous Frans Hals; Rachel Ruysch, one of the finest flower painters of the 18th century; and Maria Sibylla Merian, a naturalist, entomologist, and scientific illustrator.
The range of the Catholic artists seen in this company is broad. Some show members of religious orders, such as the self-portrait of Louis Hollandine, Princess of the Palatinate, dressed as a Benedictine nun, or the portrait of the Catholic clergyman Augustinus de Wolff (1631), the only known picture by Maria de Grebber, member of one of the most prominent (and staunchly Catholic) artistic families in Haarlem.
Another versatile painter, Johanna Vergouwen, lived in Antwerp, in the Catholic Spanish Netherlands. She specialized in copies of famous paintings by Van Dyck and Rubens (two in the exhibit) but also did an exquisite portrait of a notary pointing to a statuette—perhaps an object she had sold to him, since she was also an art dealer.
Maria Theresia van Thielen, a Catholic artist in Antwerp, signed and dated the lush “Still Life with Parrot,” which holds its own among the many botanical paintings in the exhibit. These colorful images of flowers, birds and insects not only delight the eye as the days grow darker this autumn but also held deeper symbolic meanings for Christian artists and their patrons, reminding us of the beauty of God’s creation and the transience of all worldly things.
Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600-1750
Exhibition: 26 September 2025 – 11 January 2026
National Museum of Women in the Arts https://nmwa.org/
1250 New York Ave NW Washington, D.C. 20005 USA
Nora Hamerman is an art historian, music teacher, and freelance writer who lives near Washington DC, where she contributes frequently to diocesan newspapers on cultural topics and is the Arts editor for La Voce Italiana, a regional Italian American paper. A former Fulbright scholar, she studied for three years in Rome and travels regularly to Italy, including as a guide for Road Scholar in Florence.
