Works by Artemisia Gentileschi

Artemisia Gentileschi painted women from the Bible and myth, victims and warriors alike, with a closer naturalism than that of her father and teacher, Orazio.

She trained in the Rome workshop of Orazio Gentileschi, a follower of Caravaggio, probably soon after her mother died in 1605. Susanna and the Elders, painted in 1610 at 17, is her earliest surviving work. Susanna twists away on a stone bench, hands raised, as two elders lean over the wall above, one with a finger to his lips. A month after the trial of Agostino Tassi, who had raped her, she married a minor Florentine artist and soon moved with him to Florence, where she became the first woman admitted to the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno.

Back in Rome, about 1623–25, she lit Judith and Maidservant with Head of Holofernes with a single candle: Judith, sword in hand, raises a palm and peers into the dark while her maid wraps the head in cloth. In Venice, from 1626 or 1627, she took on the city's richer colour, as in Esther before Ahasuerus, where Esther faints in gold silk into her maids' arms and the king starts up from his throne in striped satin and white boots. She settled in Naples in 1630; later her assistants there painted settings and fabrics around her main figures.

In several self-portraits below she plays a saint, a lute player or Painting itself. Charles I, who invited her to London in 1638, owned Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting: she reaches toward a bare canvas, brush raised, palette in her other hand.

Sources: Wikipedia, Schloss Weißenstein, Royal Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, National Gallery.