 |
| Orazio Gentileschi Portrait of Young Woman as Sibyl ca. 1620-26 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
 |
| Orazio Gentileschi Mocking of Christ ca. 1628-35 oil on canvas National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne |
 |
| Orazio Gentileschi Annunciation 1623 oil on canvas Galleria Sabauda, Turin |
 |
| Orazio Gentileschi Penitent Magdalen ca. 1622-23 oil on canvas private collection |
 |
| Orazio Gentileschi Penitent Magdalen ca. 1625-26 oil on canvas Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
 |
| Orazio Gentileschi Rest on the Flight into Egypt ca. 1625-26 oil on canvas Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
 |
| Orazio Gentileschi Diana the Huntress ca. 1630 oil on canvas Musée d'Arts de Nantes |
 |
| Orazio Gentileschi Lot and his Daughters 1622 oil on canvas Gemäldegalerie, Berlin |
 |
| Orazio Gentileschi Lot and his Daughters 1628 oil on canvas Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao (formerly owned by Charles I) |
"When Orazio Gentileschi arrived in London from Paris, in the autumn of 1626, he was nearly sixty-three years old. The prospect of honourable employment at the court of the newly crowned Charles I, who had a genuine understanding of and interest in painting, was highly attractive. . . . In the event, the king did not show much interest in his work and Orazio eventually became, to all intents and purposes, painter to Queen Henrietta Maria. . . . Orazio's output during his twelve-year stay in England is surprisingly small, amounting to perhaps little more than two dozen pictures. . . . Refinement and artificiality are the currency of Gentileschi's late style, a style that is aristocratic and international, practiced equally by Gerrit van Honthorst at The Hague and by Simon Vouet in Paris. Orazio's English paintings were designed to suit the aesthetic taste of a sophisticated and cosmopolitan court. They are luminous and high-key works painted in saturated colors and with a smooth finish. They are peopled by figures with porcelain skin, enveloped in rich draperies and fabrics. The affectedly laconic gestures and the studied dishevelment of the Egyptian princess's ladies-in-waiting in the two versions of the Finding of Moses [directly below] mirror ideals of courtly beauty and aristocratic deportment. Orazio had abandoned Caravaggesque lighting over the course of the 1620s in favor of a more even illumination; although his works remained highly staged, they were less obviously dramatic. He responded knowingly to the history pictures of the sixteenth-century Venetian painters so coveted by Charles I and the clique of noble collectors in London, particularly in the Finding of Moses pictures, which contain echoes of several paintings by Veronese then in the king's collection. It may be appropriate to criticize Gentileschi's late works because of their lack of psychological depth, but to do so is to misinterpret his aesthetic aims."
– Gabriele Finaldi and Jeremy Wood, from their essay in the exhibition catalogue, Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi (Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2001)
 |
| Orazio Gentileschi Finding of Moses ca. 1630-33 oil on canvas on loan from a private collection to the National Gallery, London (formerly owned by Charles I) |
 |
| Orazio Gentileschi Finding of Moses 1633 oil on canvas Museo del Prado, Madrid |
 |
| Orazio Gentileschi Joseph and Potiphar's Wife ca. 1630-32 oil on canvas Royal Collection, Great Britain (from the collection of Charles I) |
 |
| Orazio Gentileschi Sibyl ca. 1635-38 oil on canvas Royal Collection, Great Britain (from the collection of Charles I) |
 |
| Orazio Gentileschi Head of a Woman 1636 oil on panel (damaged fragment of larger work) private collection (formerly owned by Charles I) |