Spanish School, circa 1610/1620s
Portrait of a Noblewoman, wearing large, multi-layered lace-edged ruff, silk dress with embroidery, large, jewelled necklace with double string of pearls, her hair curled and worn with decorations.

oil on card
overall: 7 x 5 cm. (2 3/4 x 2 in.)

Theodora Gertrude Winter (née Barlow)(1912-2003)
Thence by descent to the present owner

Close comparisons to portraits of both Elizabeth of France (1602-1644) (also known as Isabel or Elizabeth of Bourbon) and Maria Anna of Spain (1606-1646) allow the present work to be attributed to the Spanish School, and to be dated to the second or third decade of the seventeenth century (see Portrait of Isabel de Bourbon, Museo del Prado, Madrid, no. P001037 and Portrait of Elizabeth de Bourbon, Queen of Spain, from the Buccleuch Collection). Using oil to paint portrait miniatures on either card or metal was more traditional in Southern Europe, in comparison to painting with watercolour on vellum.

The large, closed, and high ruff in this portrait also points to Spanish origins; this was not as common a fashion for women of the period, who often wore these accessories with gaps underneath their chin, but is known to have been worn in this manner by Spanish women specifically in the early decades of the seventeenth century.

It has not been possible to identify the hand of the artist, or the sitter depicted. She would have certainly been wealthy; large ruffs and jewels as she wears would have been particularly expensive and worn as a symbol of one’s status. The fact that her ruff has numerous layers, rather than just a few, as was more typical, particularly suggests this.

It should be noted that the more delicate decoration in the sitter’s hair is more typically Italian but given Spanish Hapsburg control of Italy in the seventeenth century, it is possible that these fashions travelled and infiltrated into each culture. For a comparison for this accessory see Anthony van Dyck’s Portrait of a Lady in a Black Dress, circa 1625, previously sold by Philip Mould. Another close comparison from Italy is Lavinia Fontana’s Portrait of a Lady with a Dog, also previously sold by Philip Mould. That portrait is given a much earlier date, but is very similar in the use of pearls, the ruff, and detail on the sitter’s dress.

Theodora Gertrude Winter (née Barlow) was the daughter of Sir Thomas Dalmahoy Barlow (1883-1964), a British businessman, banker, and art collector and historian. In 1936, she married Carl Winter (1906-1966), a British art historian and museum curator. He worked at the Victoria & Albert Museum's collection of English watercolours and miniature portraits before becoming a director and Morley Curator at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in 1946. He published Elizabethan Miniatures in 1943 and The British School of Miniature Portrait Painters in 1948.

We are grateful to The Limner Company for their assistance with the cataloguing of this lot.