1528-after1587 was a Flemish Renaissance painter. She is the earliest female Flemish painter for whom there is verifiable extant work. As with many Renaissance female painters, she was the daughter of a painter, Jan Sanders van Hemessen (c. 1500-after 1563), who was likely her teacher. She went on to create portraits of wealthy men and women often posed against a dark background. Included in her body of work is a self-portrait done in Basel. She has inscribed the painting with the year, 1548, and her age, 20 years. Her success is marked by her good standing in the Guild of St. Luke and her eventual position as teacher to three male students. Van Hemessen gained an important patron in the 1540s, Maria of Austria, who served as regent of the Low Countries for her brother Charles V. In 1554, she married Christian (or Christien) de Morien, an organist at the Antwerp Cathedral, which was at that time an important post. In 1556, when Maria resigned her post and returned to Spain, Caterina and her husband also moved, on invitation of her patron, to Spain. And two years later, when Maria died, Caterina was given a sizeable pension for life. Caterina and her husband returned to Antwerp. She was mentioned in Guicciardini's Description of the Low Countries of 1567 as one of the living women artists. She died after 1587. She mainly created portraits characterized by realism. The sitters, often seated, were usually seen against a dark or neutral ground. This type of framing and setting made for an intimate portrait. There are no extant works from after 1554, which has led some historians to believe her artistic career might have ended after her marriage. Van Hemessen is often given the distinction of creating the first self-portrait of an artist, of either gender, depicted seated at an easel.   Related Paintings of Catharina Van Hemessen :. | The Samll Horse | fiskmas under sin forsta host | Portrait of a Woman in White | Peter Paul and Pbilip Rubeens with their Friends or Mantuan Friendsship Portrait (mk01) | The Sisters on the Balcony |
Related Artists:
Sophie Adlersparre
Swedish, 1808-1862
Will Frederick Foster
American . 1882-1953
Vecchietta
Italian Early Renaissance Painter and Sculptor, ca.1410-1480 Italian painter, sculptor, goldsmith and architect. He was formerly believed to have been born c. 1412 in the Tuscan town of Castiglione d'Orcia, but del Bravo has identified him with the Lorenzo di Pietro di Giovanni who was baptized in Siena in 1410. His name appears in a list of the members of the Siena painters' guild in 1428. From the evidence of later works he is generally supposed to have been apprenticed to Sassetta, but his early work has not been identified. Between c. 1435 and 1439 he executed for Cardinal Branda Castiglione (1350-1443) a series of frescoes at Castiglione Olona, near Varese in Lombardy. He has been considered an assistant of MASOLINO DA PANICALE in this enterprise, but the scenes of the martyrdoms of SS Lawrence and Stephen in the apse of the Collegiata, below Masolino's vault frescoes, show that Vecchietta's closely packed compositional style was already fully formed. He also painted the frescoes (partially published by Bertelli) in the chapel of the Cardinal's palace in the town, depicting the Evangelists (vault) and friezes of male and female saints (side walls). Although abraded and fragmentary, they nevertheless indicate the naturalistic effects of atmospheric lighting and foreshortening that, more than any other Sienese painter of his day, he had learnt from Masolino and the Florentine painters.