The Walters Art Museum has recently acquired a painting by the Antwerp-born artist Willem van Herp (1614-1677). The painting is a remarkably early European depiction of a Black businesswoman, a subject not often portrayed in art of that period.
Van Herp brought to light an underrepresented slice of life in his painting Tavern Owner on a Veranda with Two of Her Staff and a Client. This work, made in the 1650s, depicts a richly dressed Black woman—the tavern owner—sitting on a veranda and preparing a pipe while she is attended by two employees. The signs of the woman’s economic success speak to the growing participation of people of African ancestry in the economic life of the Southern Netherlands in the mid-1600s.
The work joins several other seventeenth-century paintings centering Black subjects now on view at the Walters, including Balthazar (ca. 1700), a French painting possibly from the workshop of Hyacinthe Rigaud, and Moses and His Ethiopian Wife (ca. 1650) by Jacob Jordaens, which is on loan from the Rubenshuis in Antwerp.