Portrait of a Lady

By the time this panel was painted, around 1590, France was deep in its Wars of Religion, and the woman it appears to show had been dead for a generation. The face is traditionally called Diane de Poitiers, the widow who became the favourite of King Henry the Second and, for years, the most powerful woman at his court. He died in 1559, she in 1566. So this was never a lady sitting for her painter. It is an ideal assembled decades later by the workshops around the royal château of Fontainebleau, which went on turning out these cool, half-length women long after the court that inspired them had scattered. The picture belongs to a genre they had a name for at the time, a lady at her toilette, with pale skin, bare shoulders and jewels set against a dark ground. The museum in Basel simply calls it Portrait of a Lady, leaving that old identification as a maybe.