Artemisia Gentileschi painted Judith Slaying Holofernes twice — first in Rome c.1612-13 at age nineteen, then in Florence c.1620-21 at age twenty-seven. The two canvases are the closest thing 17th-century European painting produced to autobiographical history-painting: Artemisia had been raped at seventeen by her father's collaborator Agostino Tassi in 1611 and testified at the trial of 1612 while painting the first Judith.

Between 1550 and 1700, five women ran professional painting studios in cities that were closed to them by custom and often by law: Artemisia Gentileschi, Lavinia Fontana, Judith Leyster, Giovanna Garzoni, and Mary Beale. This survey of their careers runs from the theatrical violence of Roman history painting to the first woman to keep an open workshop, a master of the Haarlem guild, and the English painter who took 83 commissions in a single year.

Painting in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe was an apprenticed trade, and women were largely barred from the workshop training that made apprenticeship possible. Eight women did the work anyway. Their paintings survive, hang in major collections, and have been recovered into the canon over the last forty years. Here is what they painted, and why the survival was almost an accident.