The museum keeps the title in two languages — Artemisia låter bygga Mausoleum in Swedish and Artemisia Building the Mausolaeum in English — and its own account of the picture records the subject: Artemisia was the widow of King Mausollos, who died in 352 BCE, and she succeeded him as ruler in Caria, in what is today south-western Turkey. The huge tomb she built for her husband and herself became known as the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The museum describes Vouet as showing Artemisia together with the two Greek architects who made the plans for the mausoleum, the queen pointing at the part of the design that was then being built.
The painting was made in the early 1640s and measures 161 × 139 cm. It entered the collection with a purchase in 1954 supported by Rapps konsthandel, and hangs in the museum’s 17th-century rooms.
Simon Vouet (1590–1649) worked in Rome from the mid-1610s until 1627, where he was elected head of the Accademia di San Luca, and was recalled to France in 1627 by Louis XIII, who named him the crown’s first painter; his Paris studio was the training ground of Charles Le Brun, Eustache Le Sueur and Pierre Mignard. The painting is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.