Portrait of a seated lady with roses, wearing a medal

Her name is lost. Cologne catalogues the picture as Portrait of a Woman and dates it between 1621 and 1627, when van Dyck was in his twenties. She sits in black with a wide lace ruff, a medal hanging from a long chain, and roses in her hand, and that is the whole of what is known about her.

The canvas has a better-recorded life than its sitter. It was in England through the middle of the 19th century, at Redleaf in Kent, and left that collection in 1870. It passed to the Carstanjen family and reached the Wallraf-Richartz Museum with their collection in 1936. In 1945 it went into Allied custody with thousands of other pictures and spent about three years at the Central Collecting Points in Marburg and Wiesbaden, where it was booked in under the number Mar 1045.