A self-portrait drawing of Elisabetta Sirani. She gazes out at the viewer, with her head turned three-quarters to the right.

The modelling with patches of regular hatching and cross-hatching shows Elisabetta's natural immersion in her father's style, but she is self-consciously freer in her handling of the chalk than Giovanni Andrea – she is asserting her own identity in her manner of drawing as well as in her subject matter. A very similar drawing at Windsor of a young woman (RCIN 903328 ), from an album of heads by followers of Reni and in the style of Giovanni Andrea and Elisabetta but less assured, may conceivably be a self-portrait of one of Elisabetta's sisters done at the same time.

Sirani's novelty value as a woman artist contributed to her celebrity and she cultivated her image carefully; her selfportrait as a Personification of Painting (Pushkin Museum, Moscow) shows her at the age of 20 bedecked in the grandest robes and crowned with a laurel wreath. She also occasionally inserted her self-portrait into her subject paintings, and thus her features are well known. The present drawing, from an album at Windsor listed in the eighteenth century as entirely devoted to her works, clearly depicts Elisabetta but at a younger age than in any other extant self-portrait, perhaps in her mid- or even early teens.

Giovanni Andrea Sirani was the principal assistant of Guido Reni, and after Reni's death, one of the leading artists in Bologna. Lacking a son, he trained his three daughters, Elisabetta, Anna Maria and Barbara, as painters: Elisabetta was practising as a professional artist by the age of 17 and took over the family workshop at 24, when her father fell ill. Her fame grew rapidly, and even during her short lifetime her works were sought by collectors across Europe. Her mentor, the biographer and theoretician Carlo Malvasia (RCIN 1151359–69), proclaimed her to be 'the scorn of nature, the prodigy of art, the glory of the female sex, the gem of Italy, the sun of Europe.'

Text adapted from Portrait of the Artist, London, 2016