Mary, Lady Van Dyck

Mary Ruthven came from the Scottish nobility and was born around 1622. She married the painter at the start of 1640, and this portrait was made about then, roughly two years before his death. She wears her hair gathered under a headdress of oak leaves, probably for the strength and constancy the oak stood for. Her left hand turns a pearl bracelet, the kind of small unposed gesture that rarely survives in a commissioned portrait, and the whole picture is pitched as something domestic and private rather than official. She was widowed in December 1641 and died in 1645. By 1746 the canvas hung in the rooms of Isabel de Farnesio, queen of Spain, at the palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso, listed there beside the fireplace.