Workshop of Rogier van der Weyden, 'Portrait of a Lady', about 1460

We do not know the identity of this elegant young lady. Her clothes are not especially extravagant and she was perhaps a gentlewoman rather than an aristocrat. In line with fifteenth-century fashion, her hair is shaved from the front of her head to make her forehead look higher, and her veil is brought down below her eyebrows. The artist has raised her ears to make her neck look longer.

Her brown gown seems to be made of wool, with contrasting collar and cuffs of a dark blue material, possibly damask, and a purple silk belt. The V of her neckline is filled by a red pièce, held in place by blackish laces. A low, truncated cone of yellow, patterned with white and edged with a golden band, sits on her head. An M-shaped headdress is pinned over this, made of a veil which has been folded so as to come down over her forehead and ears, where it seems to be held in place by a metal fitting of some kind. The pins in her hat and in the scarves at her neck are yellow, perhaps gold.

The painting is a good example of Rogier van der Weyden’s style of portraiture. A similar, slightly smaller portrait in Washington (National Gallery of Art) is securely attributed to the artist and is of markedly higher quality, both in drawing and execution. Our painting should be attributed to an assistant or follower, who had learned much from his mentor and who may have been trying to emulate the Washington portrait or something like it. Some idiosyncrasies of this portrait – the exaggerated tear ducts, the emphasis on the lower linings of the eyes and the shape of the mouth – are also found in an image of the Lamentation (now in the Mauritshuis, The Hague) which was also probably painted in van der Weyden’s workshop. Perhaps the same painter worked on both pictures.

The discreet shadows cast on the background by the sitter and frame create a sense of three-dimensional space. They are not found in surviving portraits attributed to van der Weyden, but are seen in Marco Barbarigo by Jan van Eyck and in Mater Dolorosa and Christ Crowned with Thorns by the workshop of Dirk Bouts. They are early instances of what was to become a popular convention in sixteenth-century painting.

On the back of the panel is a very damaged painting of Christ crowned with thorns. It is unusual, although not unique, to find a religious image on the back of a portrait. Although it resembles in some ways the heads of Christ in van der Weyden’s other paintings, it is not possible to say whether it was painted at the same time or in the same workshop.