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).