Lady with a Fan

The interesting thing here is the wood. The Prado dates this portrait between 1570 and 1573 and gives it to Alonso Sánchez Coello, Philip II's court painter. The support is a thin reddish tropical hardwood, possibly mahogany, which the museum calls a genuinely unusual choice for 16th-century painting. Wood of that kind came to Spain with the Indies fleets, and a panel of it in a Madrid studio in the early 1570s was an expensive oddity. Who the woman is has never been settled. She wears black velvet worked with gold braid and pearls, a small ruff, rings on both hands, and holds a closed fan. The panel has an irregular edge and was cut down at some point from a larger picture, probably one that showed her seated. At the lower left, painted on, is the number 133, from the royal inventory taken at the Quinta del Duque del Arco in 1794.