French, 'Portrait of a Lady', about 1830

This simple portrait with a highly finished surface was formerly thought to be by Ingres, but there is no justification for this attribution. Similarly, it has been claimed that it is a portrait of the operatic singer and actress Marie Félicité Malibran (1808–1836). As she lived in New York from 1825 to 1828, it has also been proposed that the portrait was painted there by the American artist John Vanderlyn, who had been a student of David in Paris. However, there is no evidence to support either claim.

Although the sitter and the artist have not yet been identified, both the hairstyle and the clothes enable us to date the picture more precisely. The hairstyle, which reveals the woman’s ear, did not become fashionable until the late 1840s – the glimpse of ear in Ingres’s portrait of Madame Moitessier was still quite bold in 1856. Similarly, it would have been almost impossible for a bourgeois or aristocratic woman to be portrayed before the late 1840s without a cap or some form of ornamentation in her hair.

If the styling of the hair is perhaps more practical than fashionable, the same could also be said of the clothes. The long bodice of the dress is typical of the 1840s, but by the mid-1850s bodices had become much shorter (as they had previously been before the mid-1840s). As the neckline is too low for a day dress, the sitter is most likely wearing an evening dress, but one that was somewhat out of fashion when the portrait was painted. In keeping with the bare background, both the dress and the wrap are quite plain, and a simple cameo earring is the only visible jewellery. These features, and the fact that the woman is not wearing a very low-cut neckline, may indicate that she has a provincial, rather than metropolitan, background, and one that is middle-class rather than aristocratic.

When put together these various clues suggest that this is most likely a portrait of a provincial bourgeois Frenchwoman that was painted sometime after 1850.