Portrait of a Lady Holding a Fan

Artemisia Gentileschi painted Portrait of a Lady Holding a Fan around 1620, demonstrating her ability to work within the formal portrait tradition alongside her more dramatic history and mythology paintings. The sitter's identity is unknown, but the quality of her dress and the confidence of her bearing suggest a woman of means and social standing. Artemisia's female portraits are relatively rare compared to her biblical subjects but show the same attentiveness to female psychological presence that characterizes all her work — the sitter observed and rendered with the directness of a woman painter who understood from the inside the experience of being a woman observed by the painter's gaze.

The elegant sitter is rendered with careful attention to the rich costume and the decorative fan, with Artemisia's warm palette and precise modeling creating a dignified formal portrait.