''Portrait of a Young Woman'' (or ''Lady Wearing a Gauze Headdress'') is a painting completed between 1435–1440 by the

Netherlandish The Low Countries comprise the coastal Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta region in Western Europe, whose definition usually includes the modern countries of Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands. Both Belgium and the Netherlands derived their ...

artist

Rogier van der Weyden Rogier van der Weyden () or Roger de la Pasture (1399 or 140018 June 1464) was an early Netherlandish painter whose surviving works consist mainly of religious triptychs, altarpieces, and commissioned single and diptych portraits. He was highly ...

Description

The sitter in this small work wears a wide, white

hennin The hennin (french: hennin ; possibly from Flemish nl, henninck meaning cock or rooster) was a headdress in the shape of a cone, steeple, or truncated cone worn in the Late Middle Ages by European women of the nobility. They were most common in ...

over a brown dress, which features a black-lined, v-shaped neckline. As is usual of van der Weyden's female portraits, her hands are clasped tightly in prayer, while her expression is generally humble. Unusually for a van der Weyden', she does not bow her head or gaze into the middle distance. Instead she looks directly at the viewer, creating an intimate relationship between sitter, viewer and artist,Campbell, 15 which art historian and research curator Lorne Campbell describes as "appealing and vibrant".Kemperdick, 22 The sitter has unusually bright, large and attractive blue eyes; their rendering may be considered outside of contemporary representation in that the artist did not reduce the size of the sitter's left eye to reflect the scale of her turn of head to the viewer's left. She is lit from a source above the canvas to the viewer's right, which sets up the falling light used to contrast the vivid white of her veil and flesh against the dark tones of her dress and volume of her head.Campbell, 53 The painting is composed through a mix of horizontal and vertical lines. The verticals of her head-dress blend into the lines of her shoulders and chest, while the horizontal folds of the veil are set against the line formed by her upper and lower lips. Given the individuality of her features, Rogier was obviously working from a life study of an actual person. Yet there are elements of abstraction in the image. The model is likely a member of the middle class, given her relatively plain dress, matronly features and accentuated breasts. It is widely believed that she was modeled on the artist's wife, Elisabeth Goffaert, though this has not been proven. The portrait is similar to other female portraits by Rogier and

Robert Campin Robert Campin (c. 1375 – 26 April 1444), now usually identified with the Master of Flémalle (earlier the Master of the Merode Triptych, before the discovery of three other similar panels), was the first great master of Early Netherlandish paint ...

. In fact, the similarity between Rogier's and Campin's female portraits is so strong that they were sometimes mis-attributed.Campbell, 19

Provenance

The portrait was held in the collection of a Princess Soltikoff in Saint Petersburg until acquired by the

Berlin State Museums The Berlin State Museums (german: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) are a group of institutions in Berlin, Germany, comprising seventeen museums in five clusters, several research institutes, libraries, and supporting facilities. They are overseen ...

in 1908.

Notes

Sources

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Portrait Of A Young Woman, C. 1435 Paintings by Rogier van der Weyden 1430s paintings 15th-century portraits Paintings in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin Portraits of women