Collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC.
For a coterie of early modern women artists spanning the 15th to 18th centuries, the past decade has marked a whirlwind of rediscovery. Unlike many contemporary women artists who have experienced elusive or sporadic success, most of these women were successful in their day but their legacies were obscured afterwards.
The still life painter Rachel Ruysch, for example, was renowned in her lifetime (1664–1750) and sold some of her canvases for more than her fellow Amsterdammer Rembrandt ever commanded in his. Her fame faded after her death, but recently this Dutch Golden Age artist’s reputation has begun to approach its former glory.
Ruysch’s first major monographic exhibition is on view at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, through December 7, after showing at Munich’s Alte Pinakothek and the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio. A Ruysch scholarly monograph is under contract as part of the “Illuminating Women Artists” series of illustrated scholarly monographs published jointly by Getty Publications and Lund Humphries.
This attention to Ruysch’s work follows upon sale of a Ruysch still life for £1.65 million at Sotheby’s in 2013, one that marked a “notable early signal drawing new attention to the strength of demand for works by female Old Masters,” according to Elisabeth Lobkowicz, a director in the Old Master Paintings Department at Sotheby’s London.
While academic interest began extracting early modern women artists from oblivion around the 1970s, coinciding with the feminist movement, auction houses pinpoint a market rise to around the 2010s. “The scarcity of these works generates demand,” Lobkowicz notes, “while each rediscovery deepens scholarship and renews an appreciation for the artists.”
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To market, to market
Image Credit: Courtesy Sotheby’s. A hurdle for auction houses is the limited supply of works by female Old Masters, women having been a small proportion of artists active in the early modern era. This has meant that buyers increasingly look for misattributed works. When a portrait of a boy described as “18th-century Italian school” was offered at English auction house Reeman Dansie in 2021, for example, it was estimated at £400–£600, but dealers and collectors recognized its similarities to works by 17th-century English painter Mary Beale (1633-1699), who was known for painting her children. The ultimate hammer price was £100,000, setting a new Beale record.
In other cases, works by women Old Masters have been highlighted in designated auctions. A section called “The Female Triumphant,” part of Sotheby’s 2019 Master Paintings Evening Sale, offered 21 works from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries by 14 artists. Two years later, Christie’s hosted its first-ever sale with exclusively women artists, including Old Masters.
Works by early modern women artists have appeared more frequently in general auctions too. A highlight of the Sotheby’s Old Master evening auction in July was a work by the Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653), David with the Head of Goliath (1620s–30s), which sold for £1.9 million.
The record price at auction for a female Old Master stands at just over $7 million for French artist Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Le Brun’s (1755-1842) Portrait of Muhammad Dervish Khan (1788). While paintings by male artists have gone much higher, “the trajectory is clear,” says Maja Markovic, Head of Evening Sale, Old Master paintings, for Christie’s London. “The finest works by women are no longer treated as outliers but as central to the category, and their valuations reflect both artistic quality and a growing recognition of their historical importance.”
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Museums show interest
Image Credit: Copyright © Christie’s Images Ltd. 2021. Much of the recent publicity surrounding early modern women artists comes from museums eager to correct imbalances within their collections. “As institutions have become increasingly active buyers, competition for high-quality works is intense, making the appearance of a securely attributed, museum-quality example on the market a rare and highly prized event,” notes Markovic.
When London’s National 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 moment,” says Markovic. At the time, it was only the 21st artwork by a woman to enter that museum’s permanent collection of more than 2,300 works.
The following year, Lucretia (ca. 1657)by Gentileschi sold for a record €4.8 million at Artcurial and was acquired by Los Angeles’s Getty Museum in 2021. The Getty also purchased the pastel Portrait of Madame Charles Mitoire with Her Children (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 times the work’s low estimate).
Still Life of a Bowl of Strawberries, Basket of Cherries, and Branch of Gooseberries (1631) by Louise Moillon (1610-1696), also French, sold for €1,662,400 at Aguttes in Paris in 2022, setting an auction record for her; it was later acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Also that year, a painting cautiously attributed to the Dutch artist Judith Leyster (1609-1660) of a boy holding grapes in his hat (ca. 1630) fetched more than 125 times its high estimate when it sold for €230,000 at Vanderkindere in Brussels, bought by the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire.
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., acquired Bust of Minerva (1819) by the French still life painter Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744-1818) from Christie’s Paris in 2023 for €2,581,000, setting a world record for the artist. And this past 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 Art.
In turn, market values sometimes spike after institutional exhibitions. The Belgian painter Michaelina Wautier’s (1604-1689) prices rose after her 2018 retrospective at Museum aan de Stroom in Antwerp—a breakthrough in reviving her legacy. Christie’s sold one of her portraits in 2019 for $759,000 (exceeding its $500,000 high estimate) and a smaller work, Head of a Boy (mid-1650s), in 2021 for £400,000, well beyond its high estimate of £80,000. The market for the Italian painter Lavinia Fontana’s (1552-1614) works rose after her 2019 two-artist show with fellow Italian Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625) at the Museo del Prado in Madrid; at the Christie’s all-women sale in 2021, a sketch by her sold for €162,500 (more than double the low estimate).
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Institutions showcase women Old Masters
Image Credit: Collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. Photo: Lee Stalsworth, Fine Art through Photography, LLC. Museum schedules have increasingly featured shows of early modern women artists. “Over the past decade, exhibitions have played a crucial role in reinforcing collector interest and underscoring these artists as central figures in art history,” says Lobkowicz.
The list of exhibitions is long, with the traveling exhibition of Ruysch’s work only the most recent. Among them, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounted a Vigée Le Brun show in 2016. The following year, Florence’s Uffizi Gallery announced efforts to show more works by women in its permanent displays and special exhibitions; it hosted a monographic show of paintings by Florentine artist Plautilla Nelli (1524-1588) that year (and later shows for the Italian Baroque painters Elisabetta Sirani (1638-1665) and Giovanna Garzoni (1600-1670)). Madrid’s Museo del Prado began a similar effort around the same time and mounted an exhibition of work by Flemish artist Clara Peeters (ca. 1587-1636) in 2016-17, followed by its two-artist show for Anguissola and Fontana.
After acquiring its Gentileschi painting, London’s National Gallery hosted a major solo exhibition of her work in 2020. Also in London, the Swiss artist Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) got the monographic treatment at the Royal Academy in 2024.
Group shows have become more frequent too. In 2021 the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris hosted “Women Painters 1780–1830: The Birth of a Battle,”with 80 paintings by artists featured in French art salons in those years. The same year, the Palazzo Reale in Milan mounted “The Ladies of Art: Stories of Women from the 16th and 17th Centuries,”showcasing 130 works by 34 artists. Also in 2021, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, presented “By Her Hand: Artemisia Gentileschi and Women Artists in Italy, 1500–1800,” with 60 works, some publicly exhibited for the first time.
An upcoming group exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., “Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600–1750,” opens on September 26 and spotlights northern European artists. “Ironically, the biggest challenge we’ve faced with this exhibition is getting loans due to the extremely high interest in early modern women artists at the moment,” says Virginia Treanor, the museum’s senior curator. “Many objects were already committed to other projects, or institutions were loath to let their one work by a woman be lent as that would mean going without it on their walls for a few months. Addressing the root causes of the paucity of women in museum collections is something that should be discussed openly by institutions.”
Museum exhibitions, in some cases, have followed external advocacy to restore long-ignored and undisplayed works by women. In Italy, the Advancing Women Artists (AWA) nonprofit organization (active between 2007 and 2021) collaborated with museums to support the identification, conservation, and exhibition of works by female Old Masters in their storerooms. “When AWA first started out, the museum directors (many female) did question our reasoning and sometimes suggested a more important work by a male artist,” says Jane Adams, who was involved with AWA and has co-founded a similar organization called Artemisia Gold. “This did change quite quickly as we insisted that the paintings by female artists have an important role in the cultural heritage of Italy and that their stories need to be told.”
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Put it in print
Image Credit: Collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC. Photo: Lee Stalsworth, Fine Art through Photography, LLC. As museums pay closer attention to works by women, exhibition catalogs provide opportunities for scholarship. This joins a general shift in the publishing world to devote more in-depth studies to early modern women artists, very few of whom very few were book subjects in the past.
“There was not, in the publishing landscape, a sustained effort by a single publisher or publishing coalition dedicated to profiling pre-modern women artists,” notes Erika Gaffney, acquisitions editor at Amsterdam University Press and Lund Humphries. It was she who proposed “Illuminating Women Artists” (IWA). The project has released 11 books on early modern women artists since its inaugural 2021 volume on the Spanish Baroque sculptor Luisa Roldán. It has two more titles slated for publication in spring 2026, and three additional books (including the forthcoming book on Ruysch) under contract.
“The series resides on a feminist continuum. Written by specialists using accessible prose, the books aim to elucidate their perspectives to a wider audience,” Andrea Pearson and Marilyn Dunn, editors of the Renaissance and Baroque portion of the series, note in an email to ARTnews.
“Since the IWA series launched, I have received direct feedback—and also seen such feedback on social media—to the effect of, ‘I wish they’d taught about these women when I was in high school or college,’” Gaffney adds.
To market, to market
A hurdle for auction houses is the limited supply of works by female Old Masters, women having been a small proportion of artists active in the early modern era. This has meant that buyers increasingly look for misattributed works. When a portrait of a boy described as “18th-century Italian school” was offered at English auction house Reeman Dansie in 2021, for example, it was estimated at £400–£600, but dealers and collectors recognized its similarities to works by 17th-century English painter Mary Beale (1633-1699), who was known for painting her children. The ultimate hammer price was £100,000, setting a new Beale record.
In other cases, works by women Old Masters have been highlighted in designated auctions. A section called “The Female Triumphant,” part of Sotheby’s 2019 Master Paintings Evening Sale, offered 21 works from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries by 14 artists. Two years later, Christie’s hosted its first-ever sale with exclusively women artists, including Old Masters.
Works by early modern women artists have appeared more frequently in general auctions too. A highlight of the Sotheby’s Old Master evening auction in July was a work by the Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653), David with the Head of Goliath (1620s–30s), which sold for £1.9 million.
The record price at auction for a female Old Master stands at just over $7 million for French artist Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Le Brun’s (1755-1842) Portrait of Muhammad Dervish Khan (1788). While paintings by male artists have gone much higher, “the trajectory is clear,” says Maja Markovic, Head of Evening Sale, Old Master paintings, for Christie’s London. “The finest works by women are no longer treated as outliers but as central to the category, and their valuations reflect both artistic quality and a growing recognition of their historical importance.”
Museums show interest
Much of the recent publicity surrounding early modern women artists comes from museums eager to correct imbalances within their collections. “As institutions have become increasingly active buyers, competition for high-quality works is intense, making the appearance of a securely attributed, museum-quality example on the market a rare and highly prized event,” notes Markovic.
When London’s National 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 moment,” says Markovic. At the time, it was only the 21st artwork by a woman to enter that museum’s permanent collection of more than 2,300 works.
The following year, Lucretia (ca. 1657)by Gentileschi sold for a record €4.8 million at Artcurial and was acquired by Los Angeles’s Getty Museum in 2021. The Getty also purchased the pastel Portrait of Madame Charles Mitoire with Her Children (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 times the work’s low estimate).
Still Life of a Bowl of Strawberries, Basket of Cherries, and Branch of Gooseberries (1631) by Louise Moillon (1610-1696), also French, sold for €1,662,400 at Aguttes in Paris in 2022, setting an auction record for her; it was later acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Also that year, a painting cautiously attributed to the Dutch artist Judith Leyster (1609-1660) of a boy holding grapes in his hat (ca. 1630) fetched more than 125 times its high estimate when it sold for €230,000 at Vanderkindere in Brussels, bought by the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire.
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., acquired Bust of Minerva (1819) by the French still life painter Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744-1818) from Christie’s Paris in 2023 for €2,581,000, setting a world record for the artist. And this past 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 Art.
In turn, market values sometimes spike after institutional exhibitions. The Belgian painter Michaelina Wautier’s (1604-1689) prices rose after her 2018 retrospective at Museum aan de Stroom in Antwerp—a breakthrough in reviving her legacy. Christie’s sold one of her portraits in 2019 for $759,000 (exceeding its $500,000 high estimate) and a smaller work, Head of a Boy (mid-1650s), in 2021 for £400,000, well beyond its high estimate of £80,000. The market for the Italian painter Lavinia Fontana’s (1552-1614) works rose after her 2019 two-artist show with fellow Italian Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625) at the Museo del Prado in Madrid; at the Christie’s all-women sale in 2021, a sketch by her sold for €162,500 (more than double the low estimate).
Institutions showcase women Old Masters
Museum schedules have increasingly featured shows of early modern women artists. “Over the past decade, exhibitions have played a crucial role in reinforcing collector interest and underscoring these artists as central figures in art history,” says Lobkowicz.
The list of exhibitions is long, with the traveling exhibition of Ruysch’s work only the most recent. Among them, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounted a Vigée Le Brun show in 2016. The following year, Florence’s Uffizi Gallery announced efforts to show more works by women in its permanent displays and special exhibitions; it hosted a monographic show of paintings by Florentine artist Plautilla Nelli (1524-1588) that year (and later shows for the Italian Baroque painters Elisabetta Sirani (1638-1665) and Giovanna Garzoni (1600-1670)). Madrid’s Museo del Prado began a similar effort around the same time and mounted an exhibition of work by Flemish artist Clara Peeters (ca. 1587-1636) in 2016-17, followed by its two-artist show for Anguissola and Fontana.
After acquiring its Gentileschi painting, London’s National Gallery hosted a major solo exhibition of her work in 2020. Also in London, the Swiss artist Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) got the monographic treatment at the Royal Academy in 2024.
Group shows have become more frequent too. In 2021 the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris hosted “Women Painters 1780–1830: The Birth of a Battle,”with 80 paintings by artists featured in French art salons in those years. The same year, the Palazzo Reale in Milan mounted “The Ladies of Art: Stories of Women from the 16th and 17th Centuries,”showcasing 130 works by 34 artists. Also in 2021, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, presented “By Her Hand: Artemisia Gentileschi and Women Artists in Italy, 1500–1800,” with 60 works, some publicly exhibited for the first time.
An upcoming group exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., “Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600–1750,” opens on September 26 and spotlights northern European artists. “Ironically, the biggest challenge we’ve faced with this exhibition is getting loans due to the extremely high interest in early modern women artists at the moment,” says Virginia Treanor, the museum’s senior curator. “Many objects were already committed to other projects, or institutions were loath to let their one work by a woman be lent as that would mean going without it on their walls for a few months. Addressing the root causes of the paucity of women in museum collections is something that should be discussed openly by institutions.”
Museum exhibitions, in some cases, have followed external advocacy to restore long-ignored and undisplayed works by women. In Italy, the Advancing Women Artists (AWA) nonprofit organization (active between 2007 and 2021) collaborated with museums to support the identification, conservation, and exhibition of works by female Old Masters in their storerooms. “When AWA first started out, the museum directors (many female) did question our reasoning and sometimes suggested a more important work by a male artist,” says Jane Adams, who was involved with AWA and has co-founded a similar organization called Artemisia Gold. “This did change quite quickly as we insisted that the paintings by female artists have an important role in the cultural heritage of Italy and that their stories need to be told.”
Put it in print
As museums pay closer attention to works by women, exhibition catalogs provide opportunities for scholarship. This joins a general shift in the publishing world to devote more in-depth studies to early modern women artists, very few of whom very few were book subjects in the past.
“There was not, in the publishing landscape, a sustained effort by a single publisher or publishing coalition dedicated to profiling pre-modern women artists,” notes Erika Gaffney, acquisitions editor at Amsterdam University Press and Lund Humphries. It was she who proposed “Illuminating Women Artists” (IWA). The project has released 11 books on early modern women artists since its inaugural 2021 volume on the Spanish Baroque sculptor Luisa Roldán. It has two more titles slated for publication in spring 2026, and three additional books (including the forthcoming book on Ruysch) under contract.
“The series resides on a feminist continuum. Written by specialists using accessible prose, the books aim to elucidate their perspectives to a wider audience,” Andrea Pearson and Marilyn Dunn, editors of the Renaissance and Baroque portion of the series, note in an email to ARTnews.
“Since the IWA series launched, I have received direct feedback—and also seen such feedback on social media—to the effect of, ‘I wish they’d taught about these women when I was in high school or college,’” Gaffney adds.
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