On Not Finding Women Artists--Again with Artemisia Gentileschi

Artemesia Gentileschi and "Finding" Women Artists

I've posted more than once about the magnificent Baroque painter, Artemesia Gentileschi--the first time, on 8 July 2015, during my year of writing about a historical woman every day, and then again in late 2016, when a major exhibition of her work opened in Rome. 

Artemesia Gentileschi, self-portrait,
St. Catherine of Alexandria

Today is the 425th anniversary of Artemisia Gentileschi's birth, 8 July 1593, and so it seemed only appropriate, after learning yesterday that the National Gallery (London) had just acquired a recently identified painting by Gentileschi, that I would write about her again today. 

As it turns out, the painting is not only by Gentileschi but is of her, a self-portrait as St. Catherine of Alexandria, probably painted around 1615. 

Something of its provenance is outlined by Jonathan Jones, writing for The Guardian: the painting had been in the possession of a French family, "for centuries," its authorship long "forgotten." But the painting was recognized as one of Artemisia Gentileschi's when it was auctioned in Paris in December 2017.

Then, as Gareth Harris notes, it was purchased by the London-based dealer Robilant + Voena. It was subsequently acquired by the National Gallery:

The £3.6 million acquisition has been made possible thanks to the support of the American Friends of the National Gallery, the National Gallery Trust, Art Fund (through the legacy of Sir Denis Mahon), Lord and Lady Sassoon, Lady Getty, and Hannah Rothschild CBE, and other donors including those who wish to remain anonymous. The conservation of the painting has been made possible with Art Fund support.

So what could I possibly complain about? Because, you know, I am bound to complain about something . . . But I was all primed to be overjoyed, until I read this (from Harris's piece in The Art Newspaper): 

The National Gallery’s remit covers Western European painting from around 1250 to 1900, says Gabriele Finaldi, the gallery director. “However, for a great deal of this period women were largely denied the same opportunities that were afforded to men and as a result only a handful were able to succeed in the art of painting. Therefore, works by women artists of this period are very rare compared to works by male artists, and our collection reflects that historical fact,” he says.

You fucking asshole! That's about as calm and measured as I can be when I read what Mr. Gabriele Finaldi--"the art director" of the gallery!--had to say about women artists! (A more extended quote appears in The Florentine, which adds this to his remarks: "However, although it is far more difficult for us to purchase great works by women artists, the National Gallery regularly works with women artists for its exhibitions and other programmes—most recently with Tacita Dean. We have more exciting plans for the future that we will be announcing over the coming months." I'm sorry, I am not mollified.)

Yes, women were denied the same opportunities as men, and yes, there are far fewer women artists in this SEVEN-HUNDRED YEAR PERIOD. But, give me a break--while fewer women painted, and there are fewer paintings by them, his comments are despicable. 

His attitude must account, at least in part, for this: the National Gallery has more than 2300 works in in its collection. Of their "over 2300 works," only 21 are by women. (The twenty-first is the new Gentileschi.) Yes, you read that correctly--my math is really bad, but even I can calculate that 21 is less than 1% of 2300+ works! This is far worse than even the terrible numbers for major museums around the world (see below). 

This Gentileschi painting is the first work by a woman that the Gallery has acquired since 1991!!! More math here: it has been 27 years since the National Gallery's last acquisition of work by a woman artist--and the 1991 acquisition was a gift of five works by Paula Rego. So, of the 21 works by women artists, 5 are from a single artist? And they were a gift, not a purchase?

The National Gallery doesn't make it easy to find the works by women artists in its collection, much less to count them. In fact, if you search the site for "women artists," the only bit you get is this, appended to its announcement of its acquisition of the Gentileschi painting:

THE NATIONAL GALLERY has 20 works by female artists in its collection and four works by female artists on loan to the Gallery (artists include: Henriette Browne, Berthe Morisot, Rachel Ruysch, Rosa Bonheur, Catharina van Hemessen, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Judith Leyster, Rosalba Carriera, Marie Blancour, Vivien Blackett, Madeleine Strindberg, Maggi Hambling, and Paula Rego).

I certainly can't figure out the order of their listing here, because it isn't alphabetical or chronological. Whaaaaat? What is going on? 

But trying to make sense of the listing's tally of paintings by women in its collection is even more confusing. The Gallery claims to have "20 works by female artists in its collection," and that does not seem to include the new Artemesia Gentileschi acquisition. If you search the National Gallery's collection, you'll find these artists listed: Marie Blancour (mid-seventeenth century, 1 painting), Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899, 1 painting), Henriette Browne (1829-1901, 1 painting), Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757, 2 paintings), Catharina van Hemessen (1527/8-after 1566, 2 paintings), Judith Leyster (1609-1660, 1 painting), Berthe Morisot (1841-1895, 2 paintings), Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750, 2 paintings), Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842, 2 paintings).

But that's only 15 paintings (by 9 artists). If you add in the 5 paintings by Rego acquired in 1991, that does bring the total to 20. 

But the NG "Artist A to Z" doesn't list Paula Rego or any of her 5 paintings in its collection.  Nor does it include any work by Vivien Blackett, Madeleine Strindberg, or Maggi Hambling, all of whom are named in the National Gallery's brief paragraph about the women artists in their collection, so maybe the work isn't part of the collection but "on loan." (Note: This information was correct on 8 July 2018, when this post was written--for updates, see below.)

And it looks like, even if you go by their list, the NG has work in its collection by only 14 women artists--that's including Gentileschi as well as Blackett, Strindberg, Hambling, and Rego--who, as I have said, are named in the bit I've quoted from the NG website (above), but who are NOT included in the website's index of artists in its collection. 

So who knows? The National Gallery doesn't make it clear.

But what is clear? It's clear that despite its recent acquisition of the Gentileschi painting and the statement of Hannah Rothschild, chair of the Gallery's Board of Trustees, that the "acquisition of this great painting realises a long-held dream of increasing the National Gallery's collection of paintings by important women artists," this is pretty shameful.

Shameful, maybe, and actually a worse record than many other major museums, but pretty much to be expected. From the National Museum of Women in the Arts post, "Where Are the Women?":

• Work by women artists makes up only 3–5% of major permanent collections in the U.S. and Europe, and 34% in Australian state museums.

• Of 590 major exhibitions by nearly 70 institutions in the U.S. from 2007–2013, only 27% were devoted to women artists. 

• Only 30% of artists represented by commercial galleries are women. In Australia, it’s about 40%; in Germany, less than 20%. 

• The good news is that, while in 2005, women ran 32% of the museums in the United States, they now run 47.6%—albeit mainly the ones with the smallest budgets. 

• Women still lag behind men in directorships held at museums with budgets over $15 million, holding 30% of art museum director positions and earning 75¢ for every dollar earned by male directors. 

• The top three museums in the world, the British Museum (est. 1753), the Louvre (est. 1793), and The Metropolitan Museum of Art (est. 1870) have never had female directors.

Update, 27 August 2018: Writing for BBC Culture, Holly Williams discusses a new play about Artemisia, focusing on her rape trial (and using original trial transcripts, when possible), created and performed by Breach, an experimental theater company. The play, It’s True It’s True It’s True, directed by Breach co-founder Billy Barrett, debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, at the Underbelly, Cowgate, venue and will be at New Diorama in London from 16 October to 10 November 2018. For an extended review in The Guardian, click here.

Update, 19 September 2019: It's not really news, but it's an "update" in the sense of nothing has changed . . . The title of Julia Jacobs's piece in the New York Times says it all: "Female Artists Made Little Progress in Museums Since 2008, Survey Find" (click here). 

Contrary to the sense in the art world that "gender equity was on the horizon," progress was more a "perception of change" than "reality." 

A little data from the piece: "between 2008 and 2018, only 11 percent of art acquired by the country’s top museums for their permanent collections was by women." And "Over the past decade, just 29,247 works by female artists were acquired by 26 top museums in the United States, out of 260,470 total works."

Update, 30 November 2019: Here I am again, writing the same old thing. In her New York Times story, "Museum Showcases a Neglected Segment of the Art World: Women," Aimee Ortiz details a new initiative of the Baltimore Museum of Art. In 2020 Vision, the museum announced plans for "a year of exhibitions and programs dedicated to presentation of the achievements of female-identifying artists. The initiative will encompass 13 solo exhibitions and seven thematic shows beginning in fall 2019, with additional presentations still being planned."

In covering the Baltimore Museum of Art announcement, Ortiz cites figures from a recent study published by PLOS One, "Diversity of Artists in Major U.S. Museums." The study "surveyed the public online catalogs of 18 major U.S. museums," examining some "10,000 artist records" relative to "over 9,000 unique artists." Their results show that 87% of the artists represented at these institutions are men. To put it another way, only 12.6% of the "identifiable artists" in those 18 major museums are women.

Update, 30 January 2022: Turns out, given the global COVID pandemic, the Baltimore Museum of Art's "vision" had to be "deferred" (here). The museum did issue a statement in December 2020 announcing its acquisitions, "made as part of its 2020 Vision initiative, which includes a commitment to only purchase works by female-identifying artists this calendar year" (here).

Update, 1 July 2022: The National Library's A-Z list now includes 2 portraits by Paula Reggo and 13 by Maggi Hambling.

Update, 25 September 2023: A rediscovered "lost" Artemisia! Once owned by Charles I of England, One of Artemisia's Susannah and the Elders paintings has been identified, restored, and is now on display. Seems it was just stuffed into an old corner of a storeroom at Hampton Court . . . 

Finding Michaelina Wautier

Michaelina Wautier (c. 1617-1689)

One year from today, on 1 June 2018, the Rubens House museum (Antwerp) will open the first survey exhibition of a "lost" Baroque painter, Michaelina Wautier. 

Self-Portrait,
Michaelina Wautier, 1649

Of course Wautier hasn't been entirely lost, though recognition of the painter has been very long in coming.

In her comprehensive survey of "the fortunes of women painters and their work," first published in 1979, Germaine Greer includes Wautier even while noting that only four works by Wautier were known to exist, one surviving only in an engraving (The Obstacle Race).

The situation today is somewhat improved. Almost nothing is known about Michaelina Wautier's life, aside from her dates of birth and death. She was probably born in Mons, capital city of Hainault, in 1617, lived and worked in Brussels, had an elder brother who was also a painter, and died in Brussels in 1689. Unique for seventeenth-century women painters, Wautier painted in all contemporary genres, including portrait, history, still life, and genre painting.

Four paintings by Wautier were commission by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, governor of the Spanish Netherlands from 1647 to 1656; a 1659 inventory of his collection includes one work with a mythological theme, The Triumph of Bacchus (1650), and three saints' portraits, St. Joachim Reading, St. Joachim with a Book, and Saint Joseph. (Today, the Triumph of Bacchus and two portraits, one of Joachim and the St. Joseph, are in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, while the portrait of Saint Joachim with a book, also in the Kunsthistorisches, survives only in an etching.)

But after her lifetime, Michaelina Wautier's name, if not her work, disappeared. As Julie Baumgardner notes, Wautier's surviving work was mostly misattributed, to her brother Christopher, for example, or to Artemisia Gentileschi.

Aside from the seventeenth-century inventory of Duke Leopold's collection, information about her work is still scarce. A cycle of five paintings representing the five senses is known from two nineteenth-century sales: "The five individual works on canvas date from 1650 and all (or most) of them are believed to be signed and dated. They share the same dimensions (68 x 58 cm or 70 x 61 cm) and were twice auctioned as a series in Valenciennes (France) in the nineteenth century. The series belonged in 1883 to the collection of a ‘M. de Malherbe’, from which they were sold in 1898 to a certain Jean-Baptiste Foucart." In 1899 this cycle of paintings was mentioned in a magazine for visual art (Zeithschrift für Bildende Kunst), but the paintings have since disappeared.

In 1905, Walter Shaw Sparrow includes a self-portrait by Wautier in his three-volume Women Painters of the World, but he identifies it as a "portrait (executed by herself) of Artemisia Gentileschi, who lived for a time in England and worked for Charles the First." (Today this 1649 self-portrait is held in a private collection.)

By the time that Greer included a paragraph about Wautier in her history of women artists--and the obstacles they faced in their pursuit of their art--the situation had not much changed. Greer included a small black-and-white reproduction of Wautier's 1646 Portrait of a Man and referred to an engraving of her painting of Don Andrea Cantelmo, from 1643. She also mentions the inventory of Duke Leopold, but noted that it included only "two religious half figures."

The Triumph of Bacchus,
Michaelina Wautier, 1650

Even today, even on the eve of the Wautier exhibition, the exact number of her surviving works isn't clear. Estimates vary from 26 to 29 to 30. But things are looking up for this "long-lost" artist. 

Her Portrait of Martino Martini (1654) was recently sold at auction for £318,000. Baumgardner reports having seen Wautier's Portrait of a Young Man with a Pipe (1656) at a booth at the European Fine Art Fair, where the gallery owner Sander Bijl "is selling (or sold, and quite hush about either way) the 'Smoking Youth.'"

The 2018 exhibition will not only display Wautier's work but will provide the occasion for a catalogue raisonné, prepared by Katlijne Van der Stighelen of the University of Leuven, who is also curating the Rubens House exhibition.

In view of the coming exhibition, there is currently a worldwide search for six of Wautier's "lost" paintings: the five paintings depicting the five senses, and a floral scene, Garland with Butterfly, last displayed in 1960. 

According to the notice posted by CODART, the international group of curators of Dutch and Flemish Art, "In 1985, according to the catalogue of floral still lifes by Hairs, the painting was part of the collection of Parisian gallery owner Benito Pardo. After 1985, however, the panel disappeared from view."

It will be interesting to follow the story of of the search for Wautier's works, in preparation for the 2018 exhibit.

A Swag of Flowers,
Michaelina Wautier, 1652

Update: Here's a link to the Rubens House Museum exhibit, "Michaelina, Baroque's Leading Lady"--luckily, there's a video posted online that "takes you through" the exhibit, and with any luck, it will remain online after the exhibit has ended. (The Rubens House Museum website no longer hosts the information about the exhibit, but it is all preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, to which I’ve linked you here.)

Update, 25 June 2018: A newly discovered painting by Michaelina Wautier! For the story, click here.

Update, 2 December 2022: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is currently hosting the first exhibition of Michaelina Wautier's work in the U.S., "Michaelina Wautier and The Five Senses: Innovations in 17th-Century Flemish Painting." The year-long show opened in November 2022. For Milton Esterow's excellent New York Times review, "For Centuries, Michaelina Wautier's Art Was Forgotten, or Credited to Men. No More," click here. 

And, clearly, the search for Wautier's five paintings of the senses has been successful . . . I missed this announcement, from 2021: "Michaelina Wautier's Five Senses Reunited in Boston"!

Update, 28 September 2025: More news about the "finding" of Michaelina Wautier in today's The Guardian, an article by European Culture Editor Philip Oltermann. The headline makes a bold claim: "Michaelina Wautier: The Female Flemish Artist Now Seen as an Old Master." I first posted about Wautier in 2017--what a difference these last eight years have made for the recognition of Wautier.

The piece provides a neat summary of these changes, quoting Katlijne Van der Stighelen, who is the art historian responsible for much of this change in Wautier's reputation. Von der Stighelen provides an excellent survey of what is known about Wautier's life, training, and work. The occasion of Oltermann's article is a new exhibition of the artist's work, opening 30 September 2025 at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, which "for the first time gathers into one show all known works by an artist who is belatedly coming to be recognised as one of the old masters of her age." Included among the 35 works to be exhibited are her Five Senses.

I'll link you here to the museum itself--if you can't see the show, there are great resources to explore at the website. The show runs until 22 February 2026. 

"Artemisia Gentileschi and Her Time"

Artemisia Gentileschi Exhibition, Rome (30 November 2016-7 May 2017)

Driving home late this afternoon after a long lunch with my best friend, I heard a story on All Things Considered by my favorite NPR reporter (Sylvia Poggioli) about my favorite artist, Artemisia Gentileschi.

An AP photo of a visitor to the exhibition at
Rome's Palazzo Braschi museum snapping a photo
of one of Gentileschi's most well known works

I've posted about Artemisia Gentileschi and her work before (click here), recounting my experience of wandering around the Uffizi, turning a corner, and suddenly coming face to face with one of her paintings (as opposed to a color plate in an art book) for the first time. 

Years later, a trip back to Italy became, for me and my enthusiastic son, something of an Artemisia pilgrimage (or, more accurately, obsessive stalking), as I tracked down as many of her works as I could in the time I was traveling. 

So I was particularly excited to hear Poggioli's report announcing the opening of an exhibition of Artemisia Gentileschi's work in Rome. How wonderful that such a gathering of her work is now on display in one place. And, hey, it isn't even some dutiful recognition of her life--she was born in 1593 and died in 1653, so it isn't a four-hundredth anniversary of her birth or death or anything . . . It's almost like she's an artist worth celebrating because of the power of her painting!

It's still not, strictly speaking, a solo show--a third of the 95 or so works on display are Artemisia's (the rest by contemporary artists she knew and younger painters on whom her work had an influence). In 2002, a father-daughter exhibition, "Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi," was hosted in Rome and in the U.S., at the Getty Museum (Los Angeles) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

But, still, this new attention to Artemisia Gentileschi's work is welcome. However, that doesn't mean she's yet received the full recognition she's due. As Poggioli reports, 

A painting by Artemisia was sold at Sotheby's two years ago for more than $1 million.

But in a sign of a substantial gender gap also in the art market, a painting by her father, Orazio, was bought by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in January for more than $30 million. And yet, with her intense colors and heroines at the center of dramatic narratives, the daughter's paintings far outshine those of her father. (Emphasis mine.)

I know, I know . . . I'm never satisfied . . .

A self-portrait of Gentileschi

There are lots of pieces in the Italian press on the exhibit if you can manage in Italian. There is also a great piece by Lucy Gordon in La voce di New York (it's in English; click here).

I should also add that Gentileschi's Susannah and the Elders is included in the UK's National Gallery "Beyond Caravaggio" (12 October 2017 to 15 January 2017). You may be interested in Jonathan Jones's comments on Gentileschi, "More Savage than Caravaggio: The Woman Who Took Revenge in Oil" (The Guardian)--to access the piece, click here.

Artemesia Gentileschi: "The Magnificent Exception"

Artemisia Gentileschi (born 8 July 1593)

The subtitle for today's post, "The Magnificent Exception," is the title of a chapter on the painter Artemisia Gentileschi in Germaine Greer's The Obstacle Race: The Fortune of Women Painters and Their Work. I can't begin to express the excitement I felt on encountering the work of this renowned Baroque painter when I first read Greer's 1979 discussion, which is accompanied by 10 black-and-white illustrations but only one color plate. 

Self-portrait, c. 1609-12

Then there was Mary Gerrard's stunning 1989 Artemisia Gentileschi, a book that weighs in at nearly five pounds--607 pages, 24 color plates, 327 black-and-white illustrations. 

And I just about lost it in 2003, wandering through the Uffizi, when I turned a corner and found myself face to face, for the first time, with a Gentileschi painting that wasn't a color plate in a book--the painting was large, one of several versions of Judith Slaying Holofernes. (This painting, along with her Saint Catherine, was among those badly damaged in the 1993 car bombing of the Uffizi, but both have been restored.)

Artemisia Gentileschi was born in Rome, the daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, himself a noted painter, and Prudentia Montone, about whom very little is said, except for the fact that she died when Artemisia was about twelve. In assessing Artemisia and her work, Greer writes, "Great genius is the exception that makes the rule. It is always and everywhere gratuitous; the wonder is not that genius does not appear on earth more often but that it ever appears on earth at all": 

For the woman of today, Artemisia represents the female equivalent to the Old Master. She is the exception to all the rules: she rejected a conventional feminine rôle for a revolutionary female one. The price she paid was enormous: we shall never know how much of her potential was expended in fruitless friction, truculently defending her independence, exacting respect from patrons who condescended doubly to a woman dependent upon their support. 

As Greer makes clear, while Gentileschi might be an "exception to all the rules," even a "magnificent exception," her road was not easy. She was a successful, internationally known artist, but she paid a heavy price. 

Her life story has been sensationalized in film, novels, a graphic novel, and even a play that imagines Artemisia Gentileschi and Hildegard of Bingen in an "exorcism," talking about their lives and work "on an explosive arts panel about survival strategies for women artists." She is also present at Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party--her place setting is one of those prepared for thirty-nine women represent at the table.

Self-portrait, c. 1630

Maybe "sensationalized" is the wrong word to use here, because there was a well-documented rape trial. If you are interested in the lives of women in the past, as I am, the charges brought by Artemisia's father against the painter Agostino Tassi, whom he had hired to tutor his daughter, are not insignificant, and it's easy enough to find the details online. But Artemisia Gentileschi is more than this single event, as traumatic as this assault was. 

From 1614 to 1620, Artemisia Gentileschi worked in Florence, the first woman accepted into the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno (Academy of the Arts of Drawing). After a brief return to Rome, she was on to Genoa, then back in Rome (1620s), then on to Venice (c. 1627-30), to Naples (1630s), and eventually on to England (1638 to c. 1642).

After the Civil War broke out in England, she could be found again in Naples, where she seems to have died, perhaps in 1652 but maybe as late as 1656. These were not the wanderings of a woman who could not find work--every where she went, she found patrons, commissions, and opportunities.

Susanna and the Elders, 1610

But such a listing of where she worked is a mere itinerary, however. The works speak for themselves. Most memorable, at least for me, are her paintings featuring female subjects, like her 1610 Susanna and the Elders.

The most widely recognized of her paintings are her variations on the topic of Judith slaying Holofernes. They are mesmerizing--graphic, bloody, powerful, memorable. One of these Judiths is what stopped me dead in my tracks at the Uffizi in 2003. After hours spent in the galleries, where all the great artworks had begun to blur together and send me into system overload, experiencing that painting was a singular and memorable moment. (My son gave me three magnificent reproductions of Artemisia's Judith paintings last Christmas--they are hanging above my desk as I write this post!)

There are many excellent books on Artemisia Gentileschi and her work, more recent than the Greer and Garrard works I've noted above. But I'll link you here to a wonderful biography and online gallery from The Art History Archive. After that, you won't have any trouble finding more.

(I don't usually link you to Wikipedia articles, since anyone can find them--but there's an extensive bibliography there, which is something the Art History Archive does not provide.) 

Also, just for fun, I pulled my massive college art history textbook off the shelf--H. W. Janson's History of Art, the 1968 "Twelfth Printing." Guess who's not there??? But, not only was there no Artemisia Gentileschi, there were  no women artists at all in that book, and not a single woman artist made her way into this standard art-history textbook until 1986, nearly twenty years later--when twenty-one women were included! Twenty years after that, only twenty-seven women artists were included. (Compared to 268 men.) And of the twenty-seven women artists, only nineteen were represented with images of their work. (But at least the 8th edition had one of Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith paintings was on the cover . . . Good, I guess?)

Update: The 9th edition of Janson's art-history classic still contains a whopping twenty-seven women artists!!! Out of 318 artists . . . ???!*

Judith Beheading Holofernes, c. 1612-13

*The fact sheet published by the National Museum of Women in the Arts is continuously updated, so I no longer see this information about Janson's history of art there. I've left in the link because the data published by the NMWA about women artists is so stark. Here is a link to Kenneth Best's "Setting the Record Straight," published by the University of Connecticut, which contains the original citation about representation of women artists in the 9th edition of Janson's History. 

Update, December 2018: The National Gallery (London) is planning for a magnificent exhibition of Artemisia, scheduled for Spring/Summer (April - July) of 2020! (The gallery recently purchased a newly identified self-portrait by Gentileschi.)

Update, 16 March 2020: Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the National Gallery has postponed the opening of its Artemisia exhibition--the gallery insists the exhibition has not been canceled, merely delayed until conditions change. Here's a link to the National Gallery page for the exhibition: click here. You can still see images and information about the exhibition at the website.

In the mean time, you may want to listen to this episode of BBC's The Forum, broadcast 26 March  2020: "Artemisia: The Painter Who Took on the Men." In addition to Mary Garrard, the panel includes Letizia Treves, curator of the 2020 Artemisia exhibition at the National Gallery.

One curious detail: During the broadcast, Jesse Locker notes that Artemisia may have died during the plague that hit Naples in 1656 (when she died isn't clear--the last document from her that survives is a contract from 1654). As I listen during a global pandemic,  I couldn't help but gasp--the coincidence, if Artemisia died in a time of plague, is unbearable.

Update, 25 September 2023: A rediscovered "lost" Artemisia! Once owned by Charles I of England, One of Artemisia's Susannah and the Elders paintings has been identified, restored, and is now on display. Seems it was just stuffed into an old corner of a storeroom at Hampton Court . . . 

Update, 23 February 2026: A newly acquired painting by Artemisia Gentileschi will go on exhibition at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.). For Katy Hessel's reflections on Gentileschi's Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy, "Neither Saint Nor Sinner, Artemisia Gentileschi's Mary Magdalene Is Electrifyingly Alive" (in The Guardian), click here.