Rediscovered Wautier painting

Michaelina Wautier’s The Triumph of Bacchus is back in London view in a Royal Academy exhibition that runs from March 27 to June 21, 2026. (royalacademy.org.uk) The painting was made around 1650 to 1656, measures about 270 by 354 centimeters, and now belongs to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. (en.wikipedia.org) Its modern comeback began in 1993, when Belgian art historian Katlijne Van der Stighelen spotted the huge Bacchus scene in storage at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. (theartnewspaper.com) That find led to years of attribution work, a first major retrospective in Antwerp in 2018, and a larger Vienna show in 2025 and early 2026 that gathered almost all of Wautier’s known oeuvre. (mas.be) (khm.at) The London show has turned the painting into a fresh museum talking point because Wautier was active in Brussels in the mid-17th century, was successful in her own lifetime, and then largely disappeared from standard art-history accounts in the 18th century. (royalacademy.org.uk) Curators and scholars now present her as an artist who worked across portraits, still lifes, genre scenes, and large history paintings, a range that was unusual for a woman painter of her period. (theartnewspaper.com) (royalacademy.org.uk) The Triumph of Bacchus keeps coming up in those debates because Wautier placed herself inside the scene as a bacchante and painted a large group of nude male bodies at monumental scale. (royalacademy.org.uk) (en.wikipedia.org) That subject matter mattered to attribution history: the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s director Jonathan Fine said in 2025 that “for many years people didn’t believe that the canvases done by her were by her,” even though about half of her roughly 35 surviving works are signed. (smithsonianmag.com) The Royal Academy’s curator Julien Domercq told *The Art Newspaper* that Wautier is “genuinely a rediscovery of the last 20 or 30 years,” and the London exhibition includes 25 works, among them The Triumph of Bacchus and the recently identified The Five Senses series. (theartnewspaper.com) So the current conversation is not about a new painting turning up from nowhere. It is about an old master picture, long in a major museum collection, being re-seen after decades of scholarship changed the name attached to it. (theartnewspaper.com) (khm.at)