Bust-Length Portrait of a Lady

In February 1793, weeks after Louis the Sixteenth was guillotined, the collection of the late Duke of Choiseul-Praslin was auctioned in Paris. The dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun bought this panel for the public museum the Republic was about to open in the old royal palace, and it hung there from that summer. The sale catalogue called her a lady of the Boonen family, descendants of Rubens's son Albert. The Louvre notes that this history does not make her a Boonen.

Two names have been proposed since. One is Isabella Brant, Rubens's first wife. The other is Suzanne Fourment, sister of his second wife and mother-in-law to Albert. The museum confirms neither, finds Isabella Brant even less likely, and dates the panel to around 1620 to 1625. In the early 1830s the American painter Samuel Morse, later the inventor of the telegraph, copied it in miniature into his large view of the Louvre's masterpieces.