It used to be an advantage to reattribute the works of female painters to their more lucrative male counterparts. But those days are behind us and I suspect we have reached the point where it is advantageous to do the opposite. But two wrongs do not make a right and it is a mistake to sacrifice academic rigour for short-term advantage, even when rebuilding the life and career of a lost female painter.
I enjoyed the recent Michaelina Wautier exhibition at the Royal Academy and have followed the project with interest, seeing in its trajectory a rough outline for how the Soyer project will eventually unfold. It also proves (if it were needed) that scholarship is on the move, that artistic revivals happen swiftly under the right circumstances, and that pictures now unattainable were once affordable.
Emma Soyer also spent some of her life living with a painter who worked in a similar style. And much as it would be disappointing to find Simonau when searching for Soyer, it would be similarly deflating to buy a Charles Wautier when you were hoping for a Michaelina. Indeed such is the asymmetry between brother and sister, that dealers / academics have gone to great lengths to see the brushstrokes of the latter in the signed works of the former. It is an interesting strategy. But it will backfire in the long-term.
The great advantage of Emma Soyer is that, although she comes at the very end of the Old Master period, she catches the early stages of the modern world. She is therefore well-documented, with her paintings described in period newspaper articles and exhibition catalogues. I also suspect, that being a child prodigy, her pictures are more distinctive than a painter with a more conventional upbringing.
It is also interesting to note that even Francois Simonau’s obituary mentions him as being the teacher of Emma Soyer. Suggesting that even in the decades after her death, she was seen as the more talented painter. Large output is one measure of artistic seriousness, for it suggests routine employment. Despite her much shorter life, Soyer exhibited 38 paintings at the British Institution to Simonau’s 4. A similar search in newspaper archives produce countless period reviews for Soyer’s paintings (often entire articles) but comparable results for Simonau are limited to an obituary note and an advertisement for his services in a local newspaper in 1826.
Connoisseurship seems to have become respectable again. Not a word you tend to see in common parlance, though it has found its way from the Royal Academy press release to the disconcertingly similar articles of our national newspapers. The consensus being that it was an essential part of the Michaelina Wautier project. This is of course true. For what other way is there of rebuilding the life and work of a forgotten painter? That it is possible to discern recurring patterns in human activity is a basic fact recognised in most walks of life, from plumbers to radiologists. Nine tenths of the art world struggle to reliably identifying a packet of crisps, but that is not an argument against connoisseurship.