Portrait of a Lady

Follower of Louis Michel Van Loo

National Gallery of Art

Shown from the chest up, a woman with smooth, pale, peachy-toned skin wearing a carnation-pink and white gown looks at us from this vertical portrait painting. The woman’s shoulders are angled to our left, but she turns her head and tips it to our right to look at us with brown eyes under curving, gray brows. She has an oval face with a straight nose, a hint of a double chin, and her full pink lips are closed in a slight smile. Her ash-brown hair is pulled up and back and curls across the top of her head around pink and white ribbons pleated to resemble flowers. Her square-necked, low-cut bodice is lined with lace across her pale decolletage. The fabric is patterned with thinner white stripes and wider dark pink stripes. A choker tight around her neck has a pink ribbon edged with white lace and tied into a bow at the front of her throat. The necklace is tied on with a white bow at the back of her neck. She wears a gold ring on the fourth finger of her left hand, which is closer to us. On that wrist, four strands of white pearls hold a miniature oval portrait of a pale-skinned person. The woman holds a gold and emerald-green compact with that hand, and the other rests on an aquamarine-blue cushion or cloth in front of her at chest height. She pinches something brown between those fingers, and a few specks of brown are in the box. She sits in a wooden chair upholstered with moss green on the back. A curtain or other swath of muted purple fabric is to the left, and the wall behind her has chair-rail molding and is painted soft leaf green.