In late 2024 I visited a local art school wanting to join a bronze casting or lino cutting class to learn a new skill and was disappointed that I could only get a spot in a Oil painting class. But this class challenged me beyond words. I learnt so much from the class and although our subjects were the down trodden women of the renaissance and Baroque period I tool solace in focussing on reproducing work from one of the only solo female artists of the time.

Lucretia is a painting by the seventeenth-century Italian artist Artemisia Gentileschi.^[1] It is one of three paintings that Gentileschi painted of Lucretia, the wife of Roman consul and general Tarquinus, at the moment of her suicide. The other two versions are in a private collection in Milan (painted a few years before the Getty version) and Potsdam, whilst a work in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples of the same subject previously attributed to Gentileschi is now attributed by its owner to Massimo Stanzione.^[2]

The painting is believed to date to Artemisia's stay in Venice in the late 1620s.^[3] A set of poems written by Giovanni Francesco Loredan in 1627 are believed to refer to this work.^[3] Its history is undocumented until its identification in a private collection in Cannes in the 1980s.^[4] The painting was acquired by the Getty Museum in 2021.^[5]