A portrait of Lucretia by Artemisia Gentileschi, rediscovered in a collection in Lyon, France where it was kept for 40 years, will go on sale at Artcurial on 13 November 2019, revealed The Art Newspaper.
The canvas to be presented at Artcurial is characteristic of Gentileschi's work, in which strong and courageous women from antiquity or the Bible, such as Judith, Susanna and Salome, are staged in intense scenarios. The tragic figure of the ancient Roman nobleman Lucretia appears repeatedly in the oeuvre of the Italian Baroque painter. Lucretia commits suicide after being raped by the son of the king of Rome and here she is shown at the moment right before her plunges the knife into her chest, killing herself due to shame as she was married at the time. The rape and her subsequent suicide ignited a rebellion that overthrew the Roman monarchy and led to the establishment of a republic.
Gentileschi took particular interest in the subject of Lucretia because she had been raped by Agostino Tassi, a painter who worked with her father, Orazio. Orazio pressed charges against Tassi in 1612 since he had taken Artemisia's virginity and then refused to marry her. Tassi was convicted of the rape and imprisoned, but was released the following year.
According to The Art Newspaper, this portrait was painted in the mid-1630s while Gentileschi was in Naples. During this period she also painted Esther Before Assuerus, which is now part of the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
"Discovering such a subject, which has been treated by such a mythical artist as Artemisia Gentileschi, is a privilege, and the exceptional state of preservation of the painting makes it possible a unique work," said Matthieu Fournier, Artcurial's director of Old Masters and the 19th Century, to The Art Newspaper.
Lucretia is estimated to fetch between €600,000 and €800,000 (£534,000-712,000) at the November auction in Paris. The work could easily achieve more, as last year another Gentileschi portrait of Lucretia was auctioned at Dorotheum for €1.9 million, more than double its estimate.
The record for a work by the artist goes to Self-Portrait as St. Catherine of Alexandria, a 1615 canvas acquired by the National Gallery in London in July 2018 for US$4.4 million (or £3.58 mil). The self-portrait is also a direct reference to the lawsuit between the artist and Tassi. Despite this painful period of her life, Gentileschi would later establish herself as a leading court painter in Florence and by perseverance (and talent) become the first woman admitted to the city's Academy of Design.
