Portrait de Lady Theresa Shirley

In the summer of 1622 Anthony van Dyck was in Rome, a young Flemish painter still learning from Italy, when an unusual pair sat for him. Teresa Sampsonia was a Circassian noblewoman raised in Safavid Persia. Her husband, the English traveller Robert Shirley, was crossing Europe as an envoy for Shah Abbas, and the couple had stopped in the city on their journey. Van Dyck painted her seated on a divan spread with a red Persian carpet, in the dull-gold embroidered dress and cinnamon mantle of her homeland rather than in European court fashion. He made a companion portrait of Robert on the same visit. The two pictures have hung together for centuries at Petworth House in Sussex.