François Quesnel, 'Portrait of a Lady', about 1575

A richly dressed lady gazes out at us from this painting. We don't know who she is but the jewellery and fabrics she wears could only have been afforded by the exceptionally wealthy – the extravagance of her dress is comparable with that worn by a princess (look at A Young Princess (Dorothea of Denmark?), for example). Her clothes are rather like those worn by Elisabeth of Austria, Queen of France (1554–1592), in a portrait by François Clouet now in the Louvre, Paris.

The woman’s black cap is ornamented with pearls and jewels, and a long black veil hangs from it. Her collar, belt and bracelets are decorated in the same way and make up what was known as a parure or set. The jewelled trelliswork across the yoke of her dress is made of pearls in golden settings held together with golden and grey – presumably silver – ties. Her dress is pale purple, with yellow and white patterns suggesting embroidery in gold and silver threads. Her lower sleeves are white with golden-yellow stripes. The puffs at her shoulders appear to be slashed and are covered in semi-transparent gauze; golden brooches pin the gauze to the puffs. Two strings of beads hang from her hands: they are probably two ends of the same string.

She was perhaps unmarried: she faces right, and if this portrait was part of a pair of a married couple the lady would usually have been on our right, facing left. Her clothes are French in style, but the transparent oversleeves seem to have been fashionable in England in the 1560s and 1570s. The composition follows Netherlandish, Spanish and English rather than French conventions: the figure is cut just below the crotch, whereas French artists usually cut their figures at or slightly above the waist and did not include the hands. It’s possible that she was not French but had adopted French fashions in dress, retaining her gauze English(?) oversleeves, and had asked the artist to follow foreign compositional conventions.

The painting resembles in many ways a much larger picture by François Quesnel dated 1572 and said to be of Mary Anne Waltham, but more likely to be a portrait of a French lady (now in the collection of Earl Spencer, Althorp House). Both women look at the viewer. Their eyes are enlarged and widely spaced, the corners of their mouths curl up into slight smiles, and their waists are remarkably slender. Their hands are poorly drawn and insensitively modelled, with crudely outlined fingernails. Quesnel seems to have realised he was not good at drawing hands and omitted them wherever possible, as in Portrait of a Young Woman.