Bathsheba at Her Bath

For about a century this canvas hung under the wrong name. Baron Deichmann bought it around 1865 as an Alessandro Allori, a Florentine painter who had been dead since 1607, and it passed by inheritance to a family in Thuringia, who lent it to the Museum der bildenden Kuenste in Leipzig in 1961. The attribution to Artemisia Gentileschi came later. The story is from the second book of Samuel. King David sees Bathsheba washing, sends for her, and afterwards has her husband placed where he will be killed. She is shown before any of that, at her bath, attended by two maids and wrapped in the heavy yellow drapery Artemisia liked to paint. Specialists disagree about the date, some reading 1637 or 1638, others the 1640s. The picture went back into private hands in the 1990s and was offered at auction again in 2019.