Marie de Medici, Queen of France

In the winter of 1622 Rubens was in Paris over a commission of 24 large canvases for Marie de' Medici's new palace by the Luxembourg gardens, pictures telling her own life and that of her husband Henry IV, stabbed to death in his carriage in a Paris street in 1610. This portrait was almost certainly painted on one of those trips. She had taken the regency for her son Louis XIII after the killing, and 12 years on she sat for Rubens in a widow's black. The background behind her is barely laid in, which is why the museum counts the picture unfinished, and he never handed it over. It stayed with him until his death in 1640. After that it turns up with Philip IV's brother Ferdinand, who was governing the Spanish Netherlands from Brussels and sent it on to his brother in Madrid.