Portrait of Catarina Balbi Durazzo

There is a receipt for this painting. On 31 December 1624 Agostino Durazzo, a Genoese patrician, paid van Dyck 373 Genoese lire for two portraits: one of his son Marcello and one of Marcello's wife, Caterina Balbi. She is the woman standing here, in black and silver-gilt brocade, one hand on a stone ledge, a small fan in the other.

The payment falls at the time of the couple's marriage, which is why the two canvases were made as a pair, hers and his, meant to hang together in the family's rooms. Van Dyck was then in the middle of the years he spent working for the Genoese merchant families, roughly 1621 to 1627, and full-length portraits on this scale were what they wanted from him. Hers is still in Genoa, in the Palazzo Reale, under inventory number 802.