A formidable brush

The National Gallery has bought a painting by a woman to add to the 20 it has – out of a collection of 2,300 works. The new work is anything but a token presence, for it is a spirited self-portrait by Artemisia Gentileschi as St Catherine – whose holy power broke the wheel on which she was to have been executed. Gentileschi, though a notable figure in Baroque Italy, is linked permanently to Britain, since panels she worked on decorate a ceiling at Marlborough House in London, a city where she lived in the 1630s, aiding her beleaguered father. Her first connections with England had been through the collector Charles I. This country respected women painters then (and at the formation of the Royal Academy, which numbered Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffman among its founders). It can show it does once more.