In Protestant Holland women artists are found in still greater numbers. Here the same favorable circumstances which had in former ages brought art to early bloom existed with little change. As women assumed an influential position in literature, so they did in the pictorial arts.
The religious spirit that animated many breathed in the hymns and odes of Petronella Mocas, and in the didactic poetry of Lucretia van Merken; Elizabeth Wolff made herself known by her poetical epistles; and the national drama, the fair fruit of the seventeenth century, had a votary in the Baroness von Launoy, who made translations from Tyrtæus. In like manner did women show their enterprise in the branches of study which belong to our subject.
HENRIETTA WOLTERS.
Henrietta Wolters of Amsterdam gained no inconsiderable fame as a miniature-painter. She was the pupil of her father, Theodore van Pee, and was early accustomed to copy from Van der Velde and Vandyck. The miniature portraits afterward painted by her were so perfect in finish and execution, that the Czar Peter the Great, who seems to have become acquainted with her during his journey incognito through Holland, offered her a salary of six thousand florins as court-painter if she would remove to his capital. She received as much as four hundred florins for a single picture. She declined the imperial invitation, and remained in her home, where, having lived with her husband, the painter Wolters, since 1719, she died in 1741.
Passing over several of little note as artists, though among them are numbered the Princess Anna of Orange and Cornelia de Ryk, we may pause to mention Christina Chalon, who was born in Amsterdam in 1749, and received her education with another artist, Sarah Troost. She painted chiefly in gouache scenes from country life and family groups, and is said to have learned the engraver’s art so young that she engraved a picture when only nine years old. She died at Leyden in 1808.
Caroline Scheffer belongs to the close of this century. She was the daughter and pupil of a painter, Ary Lamme, and married another, J. B. Scheffer of Mannheim, with whom she lived long in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. After her husband’s death, in 1809, she went to Paris with her two sons, Ary and Henry, to give them the advantage of the best instruction in painting. They did credit to the care of this good and affectionate mother in the fame they acquired, and returned her devotion with due tenderness and filial love. She died at Paris in 1839.
To these names should be added those of several women who devoted themselves especially to landscape and flower painting—two branches in which Holland could boast artists of skill and renown. Among these are Elizabeth Ryberg, who lived in Rotterdam; Maria Jacoba Ommegank, and Alberta ten Oever of Gröningen, some of whose landscapes, in the manner of Ruysdael and Hobbema, were seen in the exhibition of 1818. Anna Moritz, Susanna Maria Nymegen, and Cornelia van der Myin, are named by Dr. Guhl.
Elizabeth Georgina van Hogenhuizen, a dilettante, born in Hague in 1776, became a disciple of Rachel Ruysch, and gave promise of attaining to a kindred celebrity, had not her life been cut short in the bloom of eighteen.
Among engravers on copper, who employed themselves with the pencil as well as the graver, may be mentioned Maria Elizabeth Simons; she engraved several pictures from Rubens and Van der Velde in the early part of the century.
In England, the political greatness of the nation and the appreciation of art among the nobility, more than any natural predisposition of the people, proved favorable to the progress of a cultivated taste, and rewarded talent from other countries. Corresponding to the improvement in the prospects of art, we find a number of women occupied diligently in its pursuit.