Lot and His Daughters

Orazio Gentileschi painted this in England, far from the Rome and Genoa of his earlier life. In his sixties he had settled at the court of Charles I, who kept him on a salary and a house, and works like this large canvas were made for that king, the one who would later lose his head in the civil war. The story is the grim one from Genesis. Lot's daughters, believing the world has ended with Sodom, get their father drunk to continue the family line, and one of them turns to point back at the burning city where their mother stands frozen as a pillar of salt. Orazio signs it plainly on the right. He handles the sleeping Lot and the heavy folds of yellow and white cloth with the cool, polished light he had carried north from Italy.