Self-Portrait as a Lute Player

Artemisia Gentileschi painted Self-Portrait as a Lute Player around 1616–18, one of her early self-explorations in which she identified herself with a musical subject — the lutenist as representative of the arts — rather than the more dramatic heroine personifications of her later self-portraits. The combination of music-making and self-portrait was an established genre of self-representation for artists: depicting oneself in the act of artistic creation or in identification with the arts. Artemisia's lute player is a woman absorbed in performance, the instrument occupying the same space of professional activity as the easel she would use in the more famous Self-Portrait as Allegory of Painting painted two decades later.

The rich costume and the carefully rendered lute demonstrate Artemisia's attention to material textures, while her own features are depicted with the direct, confident gaze that characterizes her self-portraits.