Portrait of a Female Donor

Petrus Christus

National Gallery of Art

A pale-skinned woman wearing a voluminous, garnet-red, long-sleeved dress kneels at a low lectern in a dark gray room, in front of a window opening onto a grassy landscape in this vertical painting. The woman’s body is angled to our left, and she looks off in that direction. She has a high forehead, thin, arched brows, light brown eyes, a round jawline, and her pale lips are closed. A cone-shaped, gold headdress covers her hair. On the headdress, pearls mark the intersections of a grid made by lines of white dots, and there is a red flower in the center of each square. A gauzy, translucent veil covers her forehead to her brows and hangs off the back of the headdress. Another sheer cloth covers the woman’s chest down to the neckline of her dress, which is edged with gray fur. A gold-colored belt gathers the full skirt, which pools on the ground around and behind her. Gray cuffs cover the backs of her hands to her fingers, which touch in prayer in front of her waist. She wears a gold ring on the ring finger we can see. The gray lectern at which she kneels is cut off by the left side of the painting. Pages flutter across an open book laid on the angled top of the lectern. The floor beneath is a checkerboard of veined, muted, pale pink and ivory-white tiles. A print showing a crowned woman holding two more crowns is affixed to the gray wall with red dots, presumably wax. In the print, the woman’s robe has been colored pale pink, and she stands on bronze-colored grass. Words printed in red and black letters beneath the woman are partially legible, and include “O s a elisab. O.” Above the print hangs a shield-like object that curls away from the wall in a shallow C shape. The shield is rectangular and made up of four vertical, fluted sections. Two to the left are bright red and the two to the right are white. In the top third of the shield, a stylized black bird extends its wings against a copper-red background. The shield hangs from a gray cord on a substantial iron nail. Behind the kneeling woman, a window opening is bisected by an pair of columns. The view beyond shows grassy hills rolling back to spindly trees, a body of water reflecting the pale, nearly white sky, and distant trees and mountains, blue along the horizon. Tiny in the sky, seven birds, presumably geese, fly in a lopsided V near the top left corner of the opening.