Maria van Oosterwijck
Maria van Oosterwijck, also spelled Oosterwyck, (1630–1693) was a Dutch Golden Age painter, specializing in richly detailed flower paintings and other still lifes.
[1] Among her patrons were Louis XIV of France, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, Augustus II the Strong,[6] and William III of England;[5] she sold three pieces to the King of Poland.
[7] Despite the fact that her skillfully executed paintings of flowers were sought out by Dutch and other collectors, she was denied membership in the painters' guild, because women were not allowed to join.
[5] In a 2004 book on Dutch Golden Age paintings by art historian Christopher Lloyd, van Oosterwijck was the only woman whose work was included.
[6] Early writers tended to depict female artists by correlating virtues which were traditionally held by women with similar values gleaned from interpretation of their paintings.
Van Oosterwijck, who devoted her life to her painting rather than being a wife and mother, proved a challenging subject for these writers, and their accounts may not portray her as a fully formed personality.
[8] As an homage to van Oosterwijck's skill as a floral painter – considered an acceptable vocation for a woman of the time – Wallerant Vaillant painted a portrait of her holding a palette.
The portrait appears to reference the poem, picturing van Oosterwijck, with palette and brushes, as a painter-muse, serving as an inspiration to Schelte the poet.
[2] This painting, Still Life with Flowers, Insects and a Shell, was acquired by the Royal Collection during Queen Anne's reign, as was another van Oosterwijck work.
[14] Through the use of symbolic elements, her paintings reflect themes commonly found in Dutch still life of the 17th-century, such as vanity, impermanence, and the obligation to devote oneself to God.
She also included symbols of resurrection, giving her work a subtle bitter-sweet quality which is in contrast to some other artists of the time who sometimes, for example, would depict a large pile of skulls in order to deliver the moral message in their vanitas paintings.
