Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria


Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria is a 1615–1617 painting by the Italian Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi, showing the artist in the guise of Catherine of Alexandria. It is now in the collection of the National Gallery, London, which purchased it in 2018 for £3.6 million, including about £2.7 million from its American Friends group. It was painted during Gentileschi's time in Florence, and is similar to her Saint Catherine of Alexandria, now in the Uffizi Gallery. It is one of several paintings of female martyrs by Gentileschi that she made after her famous 1612 rape trial, in which her fingers were crushed to force her to tell the truth.

Provenance

The original owner of Gentileschi's Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine is unknown, and nothing is recorded of its whereabouts until the early 1940s when the painting was bequeathed by Charles Marie Boudeville to his son. The painting remained in the Boudeville private collection until it was sold at Hôtel Drouot in Paris on 19 December 2017 for €2.4m. The €1.9m hammer price was well above the original estimate of €300,000-€400,000. It was purchased by London-based dealers Marco Voena and Fabrizio Moretti, and surpassed the 2014 Gentileschi record price record for her Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy. In July 2018, the National Gallery in London announced that it had purchased the painting from the dealers for £3.6 million. It is the first painting by a woman artist acquired by the National Gallery since 1991, when five paintings by Paula Rego were donated to the museum.

Other self-portraits by Artemisia Gentileschi

Books and articles about Gentileschi