Portrait of a Lady

Most of what hangs in Brera came out of Italian churches after Napoleon's suppressions. A French portrait like this one arrived another way, by purchase. In 1911 the gallery's director, Ettore Modigliani, bought it on the London market and put it straight on show.

The woman has no name in the records. Her dress and her pose match Largillière's portraits of the late 1720s, so the Italian state catalogue dates the canvas to about 1729 or 1730, when the painter was past 70 and his Paris studio was turning out likenesses of magistrates, merchants and their wives in quantity. That same catalogue heads the entry Largillière and assistants, and notes that a collaborator did a substantial share of the painting.

It is a small canvas, 82 by 65 centimetres, and the museum does not have it on show.