The Ghent Museum of Fine Arts (MSK) has opened the exhibition 'Unforgettable: Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600-1750,' featuring over 40 female artists from the Baroque period in the Low Countries. The show highlights painters like Judith Leyster and Maria van Oosterwijck, as well as practitioners of crafts like paper-cutting and lace-making, aiming to restore these women to a historical narrative dominated by male 'Old Masters' like Rembrandt and Vermeer.
This exhibition is part of a broader scholarly and institutional effort to correct the historical erasure of women artists. Co-curator Frederica Van Dam notes that 19th-century art historians, predominantly men, systematically wrote women out of the canon, often dismissing their work as imitative or favoring 'high art' painting over the applied arts where many women excelled. The show challenges visitors to question why these artists were forgotten and re-evaluates their significant contributions and commercial success in their own time.