Elisabeth of Austria, Queen of France

Elisabeth, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, married King Charles IX of France at Mézières in November 1570, when she was 16. In March 1571 she was crowned at Saint-Denis and made her formal entry into Paris, and Clouet's portrait is dated to that same year. An old label on the back describes her as the wife of King Charles IX, dressed in court costume.

The panel's later owners run from a private antiquary to the state. It belonged to Roger de Gaignières, who collected portraits as records of French history, and when his collection was dispersed in 1717 it was sold together with a portrait of Charles IX. It then passed to Pierre Clairambault, genealogist of the king's orders of knighthood, was acquired for Louis XV in 1740 and was kept with the archive of those orders at the Grands Augustins convent in Paris. The Revolution moved it to the new Museum of French Monuments in 1792, and it entered the Louvre in 1817.