Browsing by Subject "Early Modern painting"

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Mayken Verhulst : a professional woman painter and print publisher in the sixteenth-century Low Countries
(2019-06-28) Slater, Alexis Diane; Smith, Jeffrey Chipps, 1951-
Throughout the course of her impressively long eighty-year life, the painter and print publisher Mayken Verhulst was more than a passive witness to the creation of art by her famous male relatives: her father, Peeter Verhulst, her husband, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, her son-in-law, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and her grandsons, Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel. She was, instead, an active participant in multiple workshops as well as in professional networks of artists and printers in Mechelen, Antwerp, and Brussels. While we are faced today with a dearth of surviving artworks produced by Mayken Verhulst, her legacy nevertheless merits exploration. Verhulst’s actions in the art world were largely shaped by her familial identity, as it was a determining factor in both the responsibilities and access accorded to her. Her artistic contributions corresponded to shifts in her role from daughter to wife to mother (in-law) to grandmother. This thesis utilizes this infrastructure as the basis of its organization, enabling a confrontation of the socio-historical conditions within which Verhulst operated. In her father’s workshop, she would have primarily been a pupil, while in her husband’s atelier, she was likely a partner whose contributions had a greater impact on the success of the business. In her roles as mother-in-law and grandmother, Mayken became a teacher, instructing these subsequent generations in painting. Verhulst’s legacy as a print publisher, in particular, is an important part of her story, as it not only spanned two decades of her life, but also provides the only surviving artistic products that can be definitively traced back to the artist. Explorations of her style and practice as a painter will be presented in dialogue with the media produced in the workshops of her male relatives. Finally, this thesis will rely on an examination of legal and real estate documents in Mechelen and Antwerp that together form a clearer picture of her career trajectory as well as of her economic and professional success