Lot and His Daughters
Orazio Gentileschi (1563 to 1639) · about 1622
An old man sleeps heavily with his head in his daughter's lap, an empty wine flask beside him, while she looks out toward the burning city in the distance and her sister points at it. The scene is the cave where Lot and his daughters have taken refuge after fleeing Sodom, and the story from Genesis is an uncomfortable one: believing that no other men are left alive, the daughters have made their father drunk in order to conceive children by him. Gentileschi does not show that act, only the quiet, loaded moment before it.
The painting is about fabric and light. The daughters' dresses, one golden yellow and one deep red, are painted with a smoothness and a satin sheen that made Gentileschi famous across Europe, and the folds spill down the canvas like poured metal. Compare the rough, freely brushed rock of the cave with the polished flesh of the figures. Gentileschi had absorbed the drama and realism of Caravaggio in Rome, but he softened it into something more elegant, with clear colours and a cool, even daylight instead of Caravaggio's harsh spotlights.
He painted the subject several times, for patrons in Genoa and later in England, where he became court painter to Charles the First; this version dates from his years in Genoa around sixteen twenty two. His daughter Artemisia, who trained in his studio, became an even more celebrated painter of strong women, and it is worth thinking about her when you look at the daughters here, who are the ones in charge. The Getty acquired the canvas in nineteen ninety eight.
Did You Know? Gentileschi painted the subject at least four more times; other versions hang in Berlin, Bilbao, Madrid and Ottawa.
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