Anne of Austria, Queen of France

The Louvre catalogues this panel as a work after Rubens rather than by him. Its record for inventory number INV 1794 describes an old copy after a lost original, painted somewhere around 1620 to 1625, the years Rubens was travelling to Paris to work on the cycle he was painting for the queen mother, Marie de' Medici. The sitter is Anne of Austria, a Spanish infanta married to Louis XIII at 14 and much later regent of France for her son. The panel hung in Louis XIV's rooms at Versailles, where an inventory of 1683 entered it as an original Rubens, and it was moved to the Louvre in 1797.