Young Girl in Profile

A paying sitter almost never asked to be painted in strict profile, and that is the first sign this is not a portrait. The girl has turned completely away from us, her face reduced to a clean line of brow, nose, lips and chin, and Jan Lievens spends his attention elsewhere. Her blond hair falls loose over her shoulders and down her back, held only by a red ribbon set with small pearls, and it takes up far more of the panel than she does. Where the light falls on it, the strands turn almost white. Lievens painted it in Leiden around 1631 or 1632 as a tronie, a study of a head made for the open market rather than a likeness ordered by the sitter. The same model appears in another picture of his, now in Leipzig. In 2007 the dealers David Koetser of Zurich and Galerie Neuse of Bremen sold the panel to Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, who gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 2019.