Margaretha Haverman

In 1722 the Académie royale in Paris, the official body of French painters and sculptors, admitted a Dutch flower painter named Margaretha Haverman. Within a year she was out again, after claims that the picture she had submitted to get in was really by her teacher, Jan van Huysum, the leading flower painter in Amsterdam. No real evidence for that accusation survives, and historians now tend to read it as a sign of how hard it was for the period to credit a woman with painting at that level.

Haverman was baptised in Breda in 1693. Her father, a former army captain who ran a boys' school in Amsterdam, talked Van Huysum into taking her on, and she is the only pupil his early biographer mentions. Van Huysum is said to have regretted it once her flower pieces began to sell. In 1721 she married the architect Jacques de Mondoteguy and moved with him to Paris.

Her paintings turn up often in old inventories, yet only two signed works are known today. One is A Vase of Flowers from 1716, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the other is in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Denmark's national gallery in Copenhagen. When she died is not known, and the last record of her dates from 1739.