Much of the recent propaganda surrounding early modern female artists comes from museums eager to correct the imbalance in their collections. “As institutions become more active, the competition for high-quality works is fierce, making examples of museum quality firmly attributed in the market to museum quality are rare and highly prized events,” Markovic noted.
When the National Gallery of London obtained the rediscovered Gentileschi job, Self-portrait of St. Catherine of Alexander (About 1615-17) of £3.6 million in 2018, “marked a watershed,” Markovic said. At that time, only one woman entered the museum to permanently collect more than 2,300 works.
The second year, Lucretia (circa 1657) sold by Gentileschi for a record €4.8 million in Artcurial and was acquired by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2021. Portrait of Mrs. Charles Mitoire with her children (1783) by French painter Adélaï de Labille-Guiard (1749-1803) created a record $764,000 (six times the job underestimate) in Christie’s 2021 universal sales.
Still life of a bowl of strawberries, cherry basket and currant branches (1631), Louise Moillon (1610-1696), also a Frenchman, sold in Aguttes in Paris for 1,662,400 euros, setting an auction record for her; it was later acquired by the Kimbell Museum of Art in Fort Worth, Texas. Similarly, that year, a painting was carefully attributed to the Dutch artist Judith Leyster (1609-1660), a boy wearing a hat (1630) holding a grape (about 1630), with an estimated value of more than 125 times the value of the grape (about 1630), when vanderkindere, Brussels sold 230,000 euros for 230,000 euros, acquired by the Currier of Art Muse of Manchester in New Hampshester, new Hampshire, New Hampshire, vanderkindere.
National Art Gallery in Washington, DC has obtained Minerva bust (1819) was created for the artist’s world record by French still life painter Anne Valleyer-Coster (1744-1818) from Paris in 2023 for 2,581,000 euros. Last April, Self-portrait of St. Catherine of Alexander (c. 1624 – 26 years) acquired by Virginia Vizzi, Italy (1601-1638) by the American Museum of Art in Los Angeles County.
In turn, the market value sometimes surges after an institutional exhibition. The price of Belgian painter Michaelina Wautier (1604-1689) rose after a review at the Aan de Stroom Museum in Antwerp in 2018, a breakthrough in restoring her legacy. Christie sold one of her portraits in 2019 for $759,000 (over $500,000 overestimate) and smaller works, head (Mid-1650s), in 2021, the price was £400,000, which is well beyond its overestimation of £80,000. The market work by Italian painter Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614) was held in two performances in 2019 with Italian Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625) at the Del Prado Museum in Madrid; in Christie’s all-female sales in 2021, her sketches were sold for €162,500 (more than double the underestimate).
