Profile Portrait of a Lady

A young woman of the Burgundian court turns in strict profile against a plain dark ground, her white linen headdress rising in horned folds above a blue gown trimmed with fur, one of the earliest independent portraits to survive from northern Europe. Painted by a Franco-Flemish master about 1410, at the very beginnings of panel portraiture, the picture preserves the courtly ideal of the age — the pale brow, the delicate features, the haughty stillness of an aristocratic likeness that looks back to the profile medals of antiquity rather than forward to the three-quarter views of later Netherlandish painting. Its survival is remarkable for a period whose portraits were almost all destroyed with the sitters’ houses, and the economy and refinement of the handling make it one of the treasures of early Netherlandish art. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.