A number of obstacles stood in the way of women of her time who wished to become painters. Their training would involve both the dissection of cadavers and the study of the nude male figure while the system of apprenticeship meant that the aspiring artist would need to live with an older artist for 4–5 years, often beginning from the age of 9–15. For these reasons, female artists were extremely rare, and those that did make it through were typically trained by a close relative, in van Hemessen's case, by her father, Jan Sanders van Hemessen.