Agnes Block was an impressive individual, particularly as a woman of the seventeenth century: undaunted by the explicit and implicit limitations imposed upon her due to her gender, she taught herself botany; she bought and developed a country estate along the river Vecht, to which she gave the name Vijverhof (meaning Pond Court); she collected watercolours of flora and fauna by the most talented and popular artists of the time, paintings by celebrated masters, coins and medals, books, and naturalia. In a portrait painted by Jan Weenix (fig. 1), she holds the centre of the composition. She was Flora Batava, the goddess of spring and flowers of ancient Batavia reincarnated as the Dutch Republic.

Yet, like so many of her contemporaries, Block has thus far mostly remained in the shadows. The socio-economic and political barriers faced by early modern women, together with the obstinately male-dominated history of the discipline of art history, have meant that relatively few of the stories by and about women’s roles in the creation, production, and consumption of art have reached us. C. Catharina van de Graft wrote the only comprehensive study of Block, and that during World War II. The book’s dust jacket notes that in those dark hours, reading about the stars of the seventeenth century provided a measure of comfort. Implicit in the text was the notion that Block was not considered one of the stars. She was merely a “remarkable woman” who occupied “a prominent place” amongst the people and friends who influenced Joost van den Vondel (who was one of the brightest stars of the period), which made it worthwhile to tell her story.

Van de Graft’s research is meticulous and thorough.