The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, has acquired an Artemisia Gentileschi painting that has been owned by private collectors for nearly 400 years. When the work goes on view today, it will be the first time the painting has been exhibited publicly since the 17th century.
The painting, titled Penitent Mary Magdalene (1625–26), centers a female figure from the Bible, making it one of the many by Gentileschi to do so. Gentileschi’s work has been prized by art historians for the way it offered her female subjects a form of interiority that was not always present in paintings by her contemporaries.
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Though lesser-known for years than the male painters of 17th-century Italy, Gentileschi is today considered one of the foremost artists of the Baroque era, largely thanks to scholarship of feminists like Linda Nochlin and Mary Garrard. A recent Gentileschi retrospective at London’s National Gallery was widely praised by critics.
Taking cues from artists like Caravaggio, Gentileschi painted dramatically composed works such as this one, in which a hunched-over Mary Magdalene experiences a moment of introspection. The painting was bought by Fernando Enríquez Afán de Ribera, the third Duke of Alcalá and Viceroy of Naples, and was displayed in his Seville home, where it gained fame, according to the Kimbell Art Museum.
After the Duke of Alcalá died in 1637, the painting was handed down to his heirs. Then, per the museum, it seemed to vanish from view, with little documentation of its whereabouts until 2001, the year that the painting appeared at auction at Tajan. The museum said an unnamed collector bought the work, then consigned it to Adam Williams Fine Art, Ltd., a New York gallery that sold the painting to the museum this year.
There are various copies of this work, and when it was sold in 2001 at Tajan, the attribution was listed as the “atelier of Artemisia Gentileschi.” But in 2021, art historian Jesse Locker published research in Apollo that seemed to confirm that the painting was, indeed, by her. He pointed out that there are copies of Penitent Mary Magdalene, but this painting contains a tasseled curtain that is not rendered the same way in other works. That same drape appears in other works confirmed to be by Gentileschi.
The Kimbell Art Museum did not announce the monetary value of Penitent Mary Magdalene. Gentileschi’s auction record, set in 2019, stands at $5.3 million.
Eric Lee, director of the museum, said in a statement, “The Kimbell has long wished to acquire a work by Artemisia Gentileschi but until now never found the right painting for its collection by this major figure of Italian Baroque art. We are thrilled to present Artemisia Gentileschi’s dazzling Penitent Mary Magdalene to the public for the first time since it was painted in the seventeenth century.”