Displaying items by tag: artemisia gentileschi

Houghton Hall, a lavish English country house built by Great Britain’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, announced that the American artist James Turrell will create a site-specific installation for the institution in June 2015. The Palladian estate, which is now home to David Cholmondeley, 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, and his wife, Rose, boasts a sculpture park, spectacular interiors, exquisite furniture, rarely exhibited paintings by artists such as Thomas Gainsborough, Artemisia Gentileschi, and John Singer Sargent, and celebrated collections of silver, marble, and Sèvres porcelain.

In recent years, Lord Cholmondeley has commissioned a number of contemporary outdoor sculptures for Houghton Hall, including works by Turrell, Richard Long, Stephen Cox, Zhan Wang, Amy Gallaccio, and Jeppe Hein.

A painting by Artemisia Gentileschi achieved €865,000 ($1,179,832) at Sotheby’s in Paris, nearly three times its presale estimate of €200,000–300,000 ($272,000–$408,000), reports Art Daily. The price sets a new world record price for the 17th-century Baroque artist.

The work existence was until recently only documented in an old black and white photograph from the archives of an Italian dealer (see artnet News report). It’s believed the consignor’s family acquired the painting from that dealer at the beginning of the 20th century.

After being hidden away for 80 years and known only in a black-and-white photograph, Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Mary Magdalene In Ecstasy” has been uncovered in a collection in the south of France and will be up for grabs at Sotheby’s Paris on June 26. The painting is estimated at €200,000 to 300,000 (approx. $278,400 to 417,600). Best known for her monumental work “Judith Slaying Holofernes,” the badass Baroque artist managed to make a name for herself in early 17th century Rome despite her gender.

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, has acquired a rare self-portrait by the Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, who is widely regarded as the most important female artist before the modern period. The institution purchased “Self-Portrait as a Lute Player” from Christie’s New York using funds from the recently established Charles H. Schwartz Fund for European Art. It is the first painting by a female artist of the Baroque period to enter the Wadsworth Atheneum’s permanent collection.

“Self-Portrait as a Lute Player” is one of only three uncontested self-portraits by Gentileschi that are known to exist. The work was most likely commissioned by the Grand Duke Cosimo II de’Medici and was recorded in the Medici collection as early as 1638. The painting’s whereabouts remained a mystery until it surfaced in a private collection in 1998. It was subsequently featured in major Gentileschi exhibitions around the world. The Wadsworth’s recent acquisition expands the museum’s already-stellar collection of Baroque masterpieces, which includes works by Caravaggio, Claude Lorrain, and Nicolas Poussin.

“Self-Portrait as a Lute Player” will make its public debut alongside works by Fra Angelico, Caravaggio, Artemisia’s father Orazio Gentileschi, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir in 2015 following a reinstallation of the museum’s European collections in the Morgan Memorial Building, which is undergoing an extensive renovation.