During the trial, Artemisia was tortured with a thumbscrew to prove that she was telling the truth.

One day in the studio, the tutor brutally raped her. Proud of her enormous talent, he hired a well-known artist to tutor her privately. As a young teenager, she learned about color and technique in the workshop of her father, who was also an artist. Gentileschi did amazing work in 17th-century Italy (it was a great time and place for painting), and she was the first woman to be accepted into the art academy in Florence. Esther before Ahasuerus by Artemisia Gentileschi, circa 1630. In America, the numbers are about the same, with women representing about eleven percent of the works owned by major museums. Reason to cheer? Yes, but Gentileschi became only the eighth female artist in the collection which has over 700 male artists. In 2018, the National Gallery in London acquired a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the extraordinary and often overlooked artists of the Renaissance. The work of female artists now being rediscovered is both extraordinary and important. Men have long been the arbiters of what counts as great in art, and too many women artists were written out of history by critics-creating the myth of the Great Male Artist. There are no absolutes of quality in art-it’s all about perception and critical acclaim. A woman artist today has a better chance of being recognized than Clara Peeters did, but gallery owners know that it’s often men who have the big money to splurge on art, and their unconscious bias in choosing which artists to display is very real. Women artists have always had a hard time being seen. “She’s really trying to be seen,” he said. The curator of the Prado exhibit, Alejandro Vergara, praised the brilliance of Peeters’s still life paintings and pointed out that if you look closely enough, many include a miniature self-portrait-a reflection of Peeters’s face on a shiny goblet. Peeters started regaining attention in 2016 when the Prado Museum in Madrid gave her a solo show-their first ever for a woman artist. Now the Metropolitan Museum in New York City has just acquired one of Peeters’s opulent paintings, calling her a foundational figure in art history whose work “suffered from centuries of neglect.” As recently as ten years ago, you could have bought one of her paintings for a comparative song. Peeters’s work is exquisite-lush portraits of food and flowers created with a stunning intricacy. She painted during the Dutch Golden Age and was an admired colleague of Rembrandt. Have you ever heard of the artist Clara Peeters? Unless you majored in art history, probably not.

The Genius of Women by Janice Kaplan