Dervish

From The Art Newspaper:

Sotheby’s announced today (10 January) the full line up of the Female Triumphant, a selection of masterworks by 14 female artists from the 16th through the 19th centuries, which will headline its Masters Week sales this January in New York. While anticipation for the sale has been high since the auction house announced the all-female component last November, the works included reveal there is more than socially conscious marketing to the hype. 

Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun’s monumental Portrait of Muhammad Dervish Khan, Full Length, Holding His Sword in a Landscape (1788) will be the star lot of the evening sale on 30 January. The portrait painter to Marie Antoinette, Le Brun's life-sized painting is one of the most significant paintings in her body of work to hit the auction block and is estimated to sell for $4-$6m. Calvine Harvey, a specialist in Sotheby’s Old Master paintings department, says “the condition of the work is far and above what we’ve ever seen before”. 

A student of Le Brun, Marie-Victoire Lemoine’s Still Life of Spring Flowers in a Basket (1807) is estimated at $80,000-$120,000 and is the only known still life by the artist. A female-centric scene of Saint Sebastian’s rehabilitation recently re-attributed to Baroque “proto-feminist” painter Artemisia Gentileschi is expected to fetch between $600,000 and $800,000. (Read more.)