A lot of the current publicity surrounding early trendy ladies artists comes from museums wanting to right imbalances inside their collections. “As establishments have grow to be more and more lively patrons, competitors for high-quality works is intense, making the looks of a securely attributed, museum-quality instance available on the market a uncommon and extremely prized occasion,” notes Markovic.
When London’s Nationwide Gallery acquired a rediscovered Gentileschi work, Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (ca. 1615–17) in 2018 for £3.6 million, it “marked a watershed second,” says Markovic. On the time, it was solely the twenty first paintings by a girl to enter that museum’s everlasting assortment of greater than 2,300 works.
The next yr, Lucretia (ca. 1657)by Gentileschi bought for a report €4.8 million at Artcurial and was acquired by Los Angeles’s Getty Museum in 2021. The Getty additionally bought the pastel Portrait of Madame Charles Mitoire with Her Youngsters (1783) by the French painter Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749-1803) from the 2021 all-women sale at Christie’s, for a record-setting $764,000 (six instances the work’s low estimate).
Nonetheless Lifetime of a Bowl of Strawberries, Basket of Cherries, and Department of Gooseberries (1631) by Louise Moillon (1610-1696), additionally French, bought for €1,662,400 at Aguttes in Paris in 2022, setting an public sale report for her; it was later acquired by the Kimbell Artwork Museum in Fort Price, Texas. Additionally that yr, a portray cautiously attributed to the Dutch artist Judith Leyster (1609-1660) of a boy holding grapes in his hat (ca. 1630) fetched greater than 125 instances its excessive estimate when it bought for €230,000 at Vanderkindere in Brussels, purchased by the Currier Museum of Artwork in Manchester, New Hampshire.
The Nationwide Gallery of Artwork in Washington, D.C., acquired Bust of Minerva (1819) by the French nonetheless life painter Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744-1818) from Christie’s Paris in 2023 for €2,581,000, setting a world report for the artist. And this previous April, Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (ca. 1624–26) by the Italian Virginia Vezzi (1601-1638) was acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of American Artwork.
In flip, market values generally spike after institutional exhibitions. The Belgian painter Michaelina Wautier’s (1604-1689) costs rose after her 2018 retrospective at Museum aan de Stroom in Antwerp—a breakthrough in reviving her legacy. Christie’s bought one among her portraits in 2019 for $759,000 (exceeding its $500,000 excessive estimate) and a smaller work, Head of a Boy (mid-1650s), in 2021 for £400,000, nicely past its excessive estimate of £80,000. The marketplace for the Italian painter Lavinia Fontana’s (1552-1614) works rose after her 2019 two-artist present with fellow Italian Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625) on the Museo del Prado in Madrid; on the Christie’s all-women sale in 2021, a sketch by her bought for €162,500 (greater than double the low estimate).
