Portrait of a Young Girl

In 1745 the widowed duchess of Arco gave her family's country house at El Pardo, just outside Madrid, to Felipe V and his queen, Isabel de Farnesio. The crown inventoried what hung inside, and this girl and her companion appear on that list as numbers 132 and 133, in the sixth room, the one kept as a cabinet. They had been a pair for about 85 years by then. The two sitters are of a similar age and resemble each other closely enough that the museum takes them for sisters, though no name is attached to either. What fixes the date is the clothing, the horizontal neckline and open sleeves of Spanish dress around 1660. The sleeves are also where the painting loosens, broad sure strokes in which colour does the work of drawing. In the next inventory, taken in 1794, the two still hang in the same room, no longer under consecutive numbers.