Judith carrying the head of Holofernes

Jean-Marie de Silguy died in Quimper in November 1864 with no direct heirs, and left the town 1,200 paintings, 2,000 drawings and 12,000 prints on a single condition: that Quimper build a museum to hold them. It opened in 1872, and in the inventory drawn up the following year this canvas was number 409. The number the museum uses today still begins with that year.

The museum gives the painting to Artemisia Gentileschi and dates it no more closely than the 17th century. Her name attaches above all to two moments in the Book of Judith, the killing itself and the pause afterwards when the head goes into the basket. The Quimper canvas is titled for a third, the carrying.

Judith was a subject she returned to throughout her career, and versions by her circle and by copyists circulated alongside her own. Records outside Quimper are more careful than the museum's, giving her this one only as an attribution and dating it around 1635, by which time she was living and working in Naples.