Artemisia Gentileschi at the Queen's House

One of the great Italian artists of the 17th century, Artemisa Gentileschi was celebrated for her dramatic depictions of biblical and historical scenes.

Born in Rome in 1593, Artemisia trained under her father, Orazio Gentileschi, before pursuing a highly successful career in her own right that would take her the length and breadth of Italy and eventually to England. 

Artemisia’s links with the Queen’s House stretch back to the late 1630s, when she travelled to Greenwich to help her father finish the original ceiling canvases in the Great Hall. Around this time, she created an oil painting of Susanna and the Elders (c.1638-40), depicting a young woman being harassed by two older male judges. This long-lost work was recently rediscovered in the Royal Collection after it had been misattributed. 

As this new loan goes on display in the King’s Presence Chamber, Dr Allison Goudie, Curator of Art Pre-1750, reflects on the significance of ‘welcoming Artemisia back to the Queen’s House’.

Henrietta Maria’s impact on the cultural landscape of England was considerable but relatively little remains of the physical spaces she inhabited and made her own as a patron of art and architecture.  

The Queen’s House is a unique survival as a domestic space completed specifically for her. Finished in the 1630s, it was a place where Henrietta Maria sought to indulge her taste for the contemporary art of the time. However, her vision for the interiors of the Queen’s House ultimately never came to full fruition due to the outbreak of civil war.  

The Royal Collection was sold off under the Commonwealth and over the subsequent centuries the Queen’s House eventually ceased being a royal residence. Partly for this reason, and often understandably something of a surprise to new visitors to the Queen’s House, the permanent collection on display at the House does not include any objects that can be traced to Henrietta Maria’s interiors.  

This is why we are so delighted to be able to welcome on loan to the Queen’s House a painting from the Royal Collection that was recently rediscovered as a commission by Henrietta Maria, and from one of the most sought-after painters of the day, no less: Artemisia Gentileschi.

Artemisia would have known the Queen’s House well, having probably assisted her dying father, Orazio Gentileschi, in completing the magnificent ceiling canvases which originally adorned the Great Hall (these were moved to Marlborough House on Pall Mall in the early 18th century). A painting by Artemisia of the ancient Roman heroine Lucretia, now lost, is recorded as hanging at Greenwich, possibly in the Queen’s House itself.  

Her painting now on display at the Queen’s House depicts the story of Susanna and the Elders, from the Book of Daniel, which forms part of the Old Testament in the Roman Catholic tradition. Although it does not appear to have hung at Greenwich historically, it would have been in keeping with other paintings featuring female protagonists from the Old Testament that we know Henrietta Maria displayed at the Queen’s House, specifically paintings of Lot and His Daughters, The Finding of Moses and Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife by Artemisia’s father, Orazio.

Susanna and the Elders was first recorded in about 1639 – around the time the Queen’s House interiors were being decorated – as hanging above the fireplace in Henrietta Maria’s Withdrawing Chamber at Whitehall Palace.  

With that interior now sadly lost, however, the Queen’s House, as the only surviving domestic interior completed specifically for Henrietta Maria, makes an exceptionally apt setting for the painting. It is one which allows us to appreciate as best as possible within a real interior how the painting was originally intended to be seen.

The room we are displaying it in at the Queen’s House, now called the King’s Presence Chamber, was, in Henrietta Maria’s day, her Withdrawing Chamber, the parallel space to the painting’s original location at Whitehall Palace. Mimicking Henrietta Maria’s placement of the painting above the fireplace, we too are displaying it on the chimney breast.  

Indeed, Artemisia seems to have had such a position in mind already when she was working on the painting, as Niko Munz and Adelaide Izat, whose research led to the painting’s rediscovery, explain:

A final flourish in the parallels between the space at Greenwich and the lost interior of Whitehall is found in the gilt carved royal cipher ‘HMCR’ (Henrietta Maria Charles Rex/Regina) which crowns the chimney breast at the Queen’s House. This echoes Henrietta Maria’s cipher which we know was carved into the marble mantelpiece of her Whitehall Withdrawing Chamber.

This may be the first time Artemisia’s Susanna and the Elders has hung at Greenwich, but it is very much at home in the setting of the Queen’s House.

Niko Munz and Adelaide Izat, ‘Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Susanna and the elders” painted for Henrietta Maria’, The Burlington Magazine, vol.165 (October 2023), pp. 1053-1073.  

Niko Munz, ‘Artemisia Gentileschi in England’, The Burlington Magazine, vol.167 (December 2025), pp. 1178-1191.