Unknown Lady

Nobody knows who she is. She stands in black, wearing the wide ruff of Spanish fashion, her right hand holding a three-strand necklace, and the museum dates the canvas between 1627 and 1632. The way she is placed was already old by then. Antonis Mor, the Netherlandish painter who portrayed Philip II and his court, had arranged his sitters almost like this a century earlier, and the pose carries the weight of that tradition. The difference is in the collar. Mor's century judged a portraitist on how faithfully he copied what stood in front of him. By Van Dyck's time the handling itself was part of what people looked at, and this ruff is made of strokes you are meant to notice. The picture is recorded in the royal Alcázar in Madrid in 1686, and the 18th-century inventories of the new Royal Palace list it as number 70.