Artemisia Gentileschi is the most renowned female painter of the baroque era, and only female follower of Caravaggio’s dramatic realism.

Still, Artemisia’s earliest paintings were all sold bearing her father’s signature. In spite of her successful career, supporting herself and her children, painting for the highest echelons of European society in Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples and London, including the Grand Duke of Tuscany and Philip IV of Spain, her work was still nearly lost to history.

A rare woman artist, and it isn’t only her talent that made her rare.

🎨 Artemisia Gentileschi’s first known work (which some scholars have attributed, in part, to her father) was painted in 1610, when she was 17 years old.

🖼 Titled Susanna and the Elders, the work depicts a biblical story in which a fair, pious wife is ogled by a group of lecherous male elders as she bathes. Though it wasn’t an uncommon subject for artists at the time, Gentileschi rendered it differently than most. In her version, the woman being aggressed—and her response upon discovering that she’s being watched—takes center stage. “Artemisia’s Susanna presents us with an image rare in art, of a three-dimensional female character who is heroic,” Gentileschi’s biographer Mary D. Garrard has explained. Unlike other representations, “the expressive core of Gentileschi’s painting is the heroine’s plight, not the villains’ anticipated pleasure,” Garrard continued.

🍵 Our tea honoring Artemisia  is called Go For Baroque.

▶︎It’s an herbal blend that brews up ruby red, as rich as the colors in Artemisia ’s paintings of strong, powerful, courageous women.