Thérèse Schwartze

Thérèse Schwartze ran her portrait practice like a business, and few painters of either sex did it better in her day. Trained first by her painter father and then briefly at the Amsterdam academy, she built a client list among the rich families of the city and made a very good living from their likenesses.

The Dutch royal family became her steadiest patrons. She painted the young Queen Wilhelmina around her 1897 coronation and became the household's favourite portraitist. She made sure the work was seen: she exhibited in at least one city every year from 1878 to 1918, took a gold medal at the Paris Salon in 1889, and in 1896 became the first woman awarded the Order of Orange-Nassau.

The honour she prized most came from Florence. In 1888 the Uffizi asked her for a self-portrait for its historic collection of artists painting themselves, where the earlier Dutch names included Rembrandt. She had reproductions of that self-portrait engraved and circulated, and sent photographs of herself to newspapers, keeping her name before the public long before that was ordinary for a painter.