Unforgettable At The MSK Ghent: Women Artists From Antwerp To Amsterdam (16001750) Finally Brought To Light

(MENAFN- USA Art News) MSK Ghent's“Unforgettable” Rewrites the Dutch and Flemish Golden Age Through Women Artists

In Ghent, a new exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent (MSK) makes a pointed claim: women were not peripheral to the Dutch and Flemish Golden Age, but active participants in its workshops, markets, and collecting networks. Titled“Unforgettable. Women artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600–1750,” the large-scale retrospective brings together nearly 150 works by more than 40 women artists working across the historical Low Countries.

The exhibition is organized by MSK in partnership with the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, where the project was presented in 2025–2026 before traveling to Belgium. It is curated by Virginia Treanor (NMWA) and Frederica Van Dam, Curator of Old Masters at MSK, alongside an international team of scholars specializing in early modern Dutch and Flemish women artists.

While the project's original English title is“Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600–1750,” the Ghent presentation adopts the Dutch“Onvergetelijk” (“Unforgettable”), a choice that frames the exhibition as an act of recovery as much as connoisseurship.

A corpus that spans media and status

Rather than isolating women's production into a narrow corner of“minor” genres,“Unforgettable” emphasizes range. The exhibition includes painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, lace, embroidery, paper cuttings, and other forms often relegated to the category of“ornamental” arts. Here, those practices are treated as fully fledged artistic labor, positioned within the same economy of skill, training, and patronage that shaped the period's better-known masters.

The show's premise is also historical: many of these artists were recognized in their own lifetimes. They secured commissions, cultivated international connections, and entered prestigious collections, only to be sidelined by later art-historical narratives.“Unforgettable” traces that arc from visibility to erasure, and then to rediscovery.

Artists from Judith Leyster to Rachel Ruysch

Among the best-known figures represented are Dutch artist Judith Leyster (1600/10–1660), Flemish artist Clara Peeters (c. 1585–c. 1655), Dutch artist Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750), Dutch artist Maria van Oosterwyck (1630–1693), German-born naturalist and artist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717), and French-born artist Luise Hollandine (1622–1709). The exhibition also incorporates lesser-known and, in some cases, anonymous makers brought into view by recent research.

International loans and private collections complement MSK's own holdings, underscoring a central point of the project: once institutions deliberately look for women's work, the available material is far broader than conventional surveys suggest.

A thematic route through training, ambition, and networks

“Unforgettable” is organized into thematic sections that track identity, ambition, professional networks, and the circulation of models, as well as the globalization of artistic exchange in the Low Countries during the“long seventeenth century.” An introductory sequence situates women's training within family workshops, guild structures, and humanist circles, while also acknowledging the social and legal constraints that shaped their careers.

From there, the exhibition moves through major genres including history and religious painting, portraiture, landscape, and still life, before turning to the so-called“domestic” arts, such as embroidery, lace, and paper cuttings. A substantial section focuses on collectors and patrons, documenting the presence of these works in significant European collections in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Another thread examines how artists navigated gendered expectations, including ideals of motherhood, virtue, and modesty, while asserting professional identity and ambition. The exhibition closes with“oblivion and rediscovery,” charting how 19th- and 20th-century art history marginalized these figures and how feminist scholarship and recent exhibitions, including this one, are reshaping the canon.

Taken together,“Unforgettable” positions women's artistic production not as an exception to the Golden Age, but as one of its essential, long-overlooked structures - newly legible when the frame of art history is widened.

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