One of the most important and influential artists working in Caravaggio’s circle, Orazio Gentileschi (along with his daughter, Artemisia) was highly esteemed as a painter during his lifetime, a period which saw a remarkable amount of artistic change and innovation. Born in Pisa in 1563, Gentileschi’s illustrious international career saw him travel extensively, including to Florence, Rome, Turin, Paris, and London, and he counted noblemen and monarchs among his patrons, spending the last 12 years of his career as one of the leading painters at the English court of Charles I.

Gentileschi’s Penitent Saint Mary Magdalene marks the pivotal moment when the artist was invited to Genoa by the esteemed patron Giovanni Antonio Sauli to create three large-scale works. The Sauli commission is today heralded as one of the most important of Gentileschi’s career; the other two works from this commission, Danaë and Lot and his daughters, are now in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum. When sold at Sotheby’s in 2016, the Danaë fetched more than $30 million, establishing an auction record for the artist.

In this large, impressive work, Gentileschi portrays the penitent Magdalene as devoutly religious, yet also with a mystical sensuousness. The scene derives from Jacobus de Voragine’s 13th-century Golden Legend, which follows Mary Magdalene’s conversion and flight from Palestine. Gentileschi captures her taking refuge in a mountain cave near Marseille, where she spent the last thirty years of her life. Pictorially, Penitent Saint Mary Magdalene is indebted to Gentileschi’s important sixteenth-century forebears: the Magdalene’s outstretched position, parallel to the picture plane, is drawn from the work of Correggio, while the image of her lost in divine reverie looks back to Titian.
v This masterful rendering of the Magdalene encapsulates the combination of two fundamental elements in Gentileschi’s art: the power and naturalism of his close associate and friend, Caravaggio, and a formal sophistication stemming from his native Tuscan traditions.

Saint James the Greater is a remarkably modern painting by Georges de la Tour which reemerged in 2005. Previous to this, the work was assumed lost and only known by an extant copy.

The work is the sixth original canvas within a series of thirteen pictures representing the Blessing Christ and the Twelve Apostles, titled the "Albi Series" after their earliest known location in the cathedral of that city. The makeup of the group was preserved in almost its entirety in a series of copies of later date, which now reside in the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi. Of the original canvases, only two have remained in Albi, and were accounted for over the intervening years: a Saint James the Lesser and Saint Jude Thaddeus. The museum preserves eleven paintings in total, with two Apostles of unknown identity having disappeared completely.

Among the most interesting and enigmatic artists of his time, Georges de la Tour was the most original and unique proponents of Caravaggism in France. The Albi Series represents one of the artist’s most important artistic achievements, and the rediscovery of the Saint James the Greater further reveals much about the complexity of La Tour's early work, executed during a period when the artist was beginning to refine his natural talent and skill.

Like the Saint James the Greater, three other originals have subsequently been rediscovered: Saint Philip, which was the first to emerge when it appeared on the French market in 1941, followed by Saint Andrew, sold in Monaco on June 21, 1991, (and again in 2021 for $5.2 million), and Saint Thomas, which was also offered at auction the following day in Monaco and subsequently purchased by the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo in 2003.

The theme of Christ and the twelve apostles was quite popular in the 16th and 17th centuries and was portrayed by various artists including Sir Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony Van Dyck, Jacques Bellange and Jacques Callot. The figures of La Tour differ from those of his predecessors in their almost brutal realism.

“Bernardo Cavallino’s disturbing painting of Saint Bartholomew holding the knife with which he will be martyred as he fatalistically stares into space, contemplating the fate that awaits him. Who would guess that this most elegant of painters could plumb such depths of darkness?” Keith Christiansen, Curator Emeritus, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Standing over five feet in height, this spectacularly grand canvas is one of the largest works Cavallino ever painted. It is also one of only a small number of masterpieces by the artist remaining in private hands. The work was likely painted in the 1640s in Naples, where it can be identified in several important early collections.

No other painting of this quality has appeared on the market since Lot and his daughters and the Drunkeness of Noah. That pair made the still-record price of $1.9 million in 1989 when they entered the collection of Peter Jay Sharp and were subsequently acquired by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid.

With an almost monochromatic palette, the painting is starkly modern and focuses on the muscular figure of Saint Bartholomew, who holds a knife that foreshadows his eventual martyrdom, when he would be flayed alive. The work’s powerful intensity derives as much from its expressive tenebrism and dramatic composition as from the saint’s naturalistic depiction, rendered with virtuosic brushwork.