An art museum in rural Denmark has acquired Artemisia Gentileschi‘s Susanna and the Elders (1644–48), a large work by the Italian Baroque artist.
The Nivaagaard Collection said Susanna and the Elders was “the most important addition made to the collection since 1908,” when it was founded by Johannes Hage. Located about 40 minutes north of Copenhagen, the museum is now the first Danish institution to own a work by the artist.
The story of Susanna and the Elders was one Artemisia Gentileschi returned to repeatedly. She painted it when she was 17, in what is commonly regarded as her earliest known work. She even returned to it in the last painting she made before her death in 1656.
The work acquired by the Nivaagaard Collection comes from the artist’s later period and features a life-sized depiction of an almost naked Susanna in a vulnerable position.
Director Andrea Rygg Karberg was able to beat dozens of international galleries for the purchase of the painting this summer for an undisclosed amount, despite the museum’s small collection.
Susanna and the Elders previously belonged to a private collection and was sold by New York–based Old Masters dealer Nicholas Hall, who had visited the Nivaagaard in 2023 as part of a vacation.
“It made a profound impression,” Hall told the Sunday Times of his visit, describing the Danish institution as “a small museum but with a room of surprisingly impressive European old master paintings.”
The rural art gallery joins esteemed institutions like the Getty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Uffizi, and London’s National Gallery in acquiring a work by the famous female artist, who was trained as a painter by her father, Orazio Gentileschi.
Artemisia is notable for being overcoming professional odds for a woman artist of her era. She was raped as a young woman and then forced to give evidence under torture through a subsequent trial; the proceedings did not tarnish her career. Customers of her work included the Medici family in Florence and King Charles I of England.
The artist has become an icon for her striking and technically highly accomplished paintings of powerful female figures, including Judith Beheading Holofernes, Cleopatra, and Mary Magdalene.
Notably, records showed there was only one work by a female artist in the Nivaagaard Collection until 2022, when another portrait was identified as done by Europa Anguissola, sister of the more famous Sofonisba.
Earlier this year, the Nivaagaard Collection also acquired two works by Flemish artist Catharina Ykens II, dating from ca. 1688.
The acquisition of Susanna and the Elders was aided by generous donations from the New Carlsberg Foundation and the Aage and Johanne Louis-Hansen Foundation.
