Portrait of a Lady

Mourning in the Southern Netherlands was an expensive business, worn to a fixed calendar and read at a glance by anyone who saw it. The Pinacoteca di Brera takes this sitter for a lady of the Croy family in Brussels, one of the great noble houses of the Southern Netherlands, and dates the canvas to 1635. No name has ever been securely attached to her, so she hangs simply as a portrait of a lady. All that black gives van Dyck a dark field to set jewels against, and rank shows through the grief: pearls at the ear and the wrist, bracelets, a gold chain, a costly cross at the throat, with a great looped hanging behind her to lift the gloom. The museum sees behind the whole arrangement a portrait Rubens had made of the French queen mother Marie de' Medici in widow's black. By the year this canvas was painted, she was living in exile in Brussels herself.