{"id":243211,"date":"2025-09-21T05:50:17","date_gmt":"2025-09-21T05:50:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/243211\/"},"modified":"2025-09-21T05:50:17","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T05:50:17","slug":"the-tiny-rural-gallery-thats-landed-a-baroque-masterpiece","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/243211\/","title":{"rendered":"The tiny rural gallery that\u2019s landed a baroque masterpiece"},"content":{"rendered":"

The queen of Italian baroque, who painted for kings and cardinals, Artemisia Gentileschi has long been an artist whose works are prized by gallery owners.<\/p>\n

But thanks to a rise in galleries looking to increase the number of female artists in their collections, her work is more sought-after than ever. <\/p>\n

Now, joining the list of owners of her works, from the Getty and the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Uffizi and London\u2019s National Gallery, is a small gallery in rural Denmark.<\/p>\n

Last weekend the Nivaagaard Collection, located in a seaside village 40 minutes north of Copenhagen, unveiled its latest acquisition, Gentileschi\u2019s Susanna and the Elders. Its director, Andrea Rygg Karberg, beat dozens of international galleries this summer when she bought the 2m-high painting for an undisclosed sum, and called its unveiling \u201cthe happiest moment\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"Artemisia<\/p>\n

The painting depicts the biblical story of Susanna, whom two judges threaten to accuse of adultery \u2014 punishable by death \u2014 if she refuses to submit to them<\/p>\n

NIVAAGAARDS MALERISAMLING\/THE NIVAAGAARD COLLECTION<\/p>\n

In doing so, Rygg Karberg established her tiny museum as one of the foremost galleries for women\u2019s art of the Renaissance and baroque period.<\/p>\n

The painting, which depicts a young woman being harassed by two lecherous men as she bathes, now hangs alongside works by Sofonisba Anguissola, the Renaissance artist who influenced Caravaggio, her sister, Europa Anguissola, and the Flemish still-life maestro Catharina Ykens II.<\/p>\n

With works on display by four women who lived before the 18th century, the acquisition puts the Nivaagaard \u2014 a museum of just three main rooms and 261 paintings \u2014 ahead of the Louvre, whose online catalogue names three female painters who lived before the 1700s in its database of about 500,000 artworks.<\/p>\n

\u2022 The secret life of the Louvre: inside the world\u2019s biggest museum<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

Nivaagaard has also leapfrogged SMK, the National Gallery of Denmark, which has three. It is on a par with the Prado and London\u2019s National Gallery, on four each. While the other museums confirmed their figures, the Louvre refused to follow suit. The museum has 200 female artists in its collection and about 1,200 men.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The Louvre Pyramid, built in 1989<\/p>\n

ALAMY<\/p>\n

\u201cI often say that it\u2019s great to be small,\u201d said Rygg Karberg. \u201cWe are agile, we can act rapidly and we are eternally lucky in Denmark to have private foundations supporting the arts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Europe\u2019s post-pandemic art world has a renewed interest in works by women. Since 2020, Gentileschi retrospectives have been held in Naples, Paris and at the National Gallery, while Rygg Karberg staged a Sofonisba Anguissola show at the Nivaagaard in 2022, and the National Gallery of Ireland held a major exhibition on the Bolognese painter Lavinia Fontana in 2023. Madrid\u2019s Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Arp Museum, in Germany\u2019s Rhineland-Palatinate state, collaborated on a landmark exhibition of women\u2019s art from the medieval period to the 20th century in 2023-24, and the National Gallery Prague\u2019s current exhibition on women\u2019s art includes works by Anguissola. The Femmes Artistes Mus\u00e9e Mougins, a museum of women\u2019s art, opened in the south of France last year.<\/p>\n

Yet when it comes to permanent collections, major galleries remain slow on the uptake. The feminist campaigners the Guerrilla Girls have been protesting since 1985 about the low acquisition rates of women\u2019s art; a 2019 report found that only 2 per cent of global art auction spending was on works by women. The former director of Florence\u2019s Uffizi<\/a> Galleries, Eike Schmidt<\/a>, made a hobby out of hauling women\u2019s works out of storage, but new acquisitions eluded him. <\/p>\n

Not all attempts to showcase women\u2019s art have gone down well, either. A 2023 Gentileschi exhibition in Genoa provoked outrage for its \u201crape room\u201d, which reconstructed the sexual assault that marked her life.<\/p>\n

Rygg Karberg\u2019s acquisition is the latest milestone in her goal to display at least one work by a woman in each of the Nivaagaard\u2019s three specialist areas: the Italian Renaissance, the Dutch Golden Age and 19th-century Danish painting.<\/p>\n

She joined the gallery as director in 2017, when the gallery had just one confirmed painting by a woman. Sofonisba Anguissola\u2019s Family Portrait was acquired by the collection\u2019s founder, Johannes Hage, in 1873, when it was believed to be by an anonymous male painter. <\/p>\n

\"Painting<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, Rygg Karberg acquired two of the five works known to be by Catharina Ykens II, whose 17th-century still lifes won her a place in the Guild of St Luke, Antwerp\u2019s equivalent of the Royal Academy. <\/p>\n

\"Pair<\/p>\n

The Nivaagaard Collection also features rare 17th-century still-life paintings by the Flemish artist Catharina Ykens II<\/p>\n

NIVAAGAARDS MALERISAMLING\/THE NIVAAGAARD COLLECTION<\/p>\n

Rygg Karberg says her mission is not about making a statement but rebalancing art history. <\/p>\n

\u201cFemale painters were always there but slipped from history along the way, mostly in the 19th century,\u201d she said. \u201cWe lost half of history. Sofonisba and Artemisia were really famous in their own time but they were only rediscovered in the 1970s.\u201d <\/p>\n

Nivaagaard was first to register interest in the Gentileschi, which had been part of a private collection. It was sold in New York by the dealer Nicholas Hall, who had visited the museum on holiday two years earlier. \u201cIt made a profound impression,\u201d said Hall of his visit. He described the Nivaagaard as \u201ca small museum but with a room of surprisingly impressive European old master paintings\u201d.<\/p>\n

Susanna and the Elders was a subject Gentileschi explored repeatedly, and seven of her paintings of the subject survive. The Old Testament tale of a woman tried for adultery when she refused to be blackmailed into sex by two men had clear parallels with Gentileschi\u2019s own rape trial \u2014 which, like the biblical heroine, she won. \u201cIt\u2019s really personal to her,\u201d said Rygg Karberg of the topic. \u201cSome of her early versions are more violent. This is more dignified.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The queen of Italian baroque, who painted for kings and cardinals, Artemisia Gentileschi has long been an artist…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":243212,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[648,1032,1033,171,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-243211","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-design","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115240725702716184","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243211\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/243212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}