Flower Painter Maria van Oosterwijck

Maria van Oosterwijck was in her early forties when Wallerant Vaillant signed and dated this portrait in 1671, and she was already one of the best-known women painters of her century. Her flower pieces reached the collections of Emperor Leopold I, of Louis XIV, and of the English royal couple William III and Mary Stuart. Vaillant puts the palette and brushes of her trade in one hand and rests the other on an open book in her lap, which the museum reads as a Bible, a sign of her piety. She was a minister's daughter who never married, with a name for deep devotion. It is the painter's only known portrait of a seated woman. About 30 of her own pictures survive, and the earliest dated one is from 1667, when she was 37.