Dame à la fourrure

This portrait of a young woman in a soft ermine wrap has spent more than a century changing hands between famous names. For a long time it was hung as an El Greco, back when it passed through the Spanish gallery of the French king Louis Philippe and later reached Glasgow, where it hangs in Pollok House. Then scholars began to doubt that. The sitter's warm, informal presence, so unlike El Greco's stretched saints, led some to propose Sofonisba Anguissola, an Italian noblewoman and painter who served as a lady-in-waiting at the court of Philip II of Spain. More recent technical study by the Prado and the University of Glasgow has pointed instead toward the Spanish court painter Alonso Sánchez Coello. Whoever held the brush, the woman looks out with a quiet, faint smile, one hand resting in the fur.