The Lady with a Fan is an original painting of a woman wearing a black lace veil on her head and a dark dress with a low-cut bodice, by the renowned court painter Diego Velázquez of Spain. On the basis of its place in Velázquez's stylistic development, the portrait is thought to have been painted between 1638 and 1639.

The sitter

The Lady with a Fan is an enigmatic portrait. Although other Velázquez portraits are easily recognizable likenesses of the members of the Spanish royal family and high nobility, the sitter in Lady with a Fan has not yet been convincingly identified; there is a lack of accurate documentary information about the portrait. The details of the costume suggest that the sitter for The Lady with a Fan could be Marie de Rohan, the duchess of Chevreuse (1600-1679), because she was dressed according to French fashion of the late 1630s. There is, however, only one evidential reference indicating that Velázquez painted a Frenchwoman. This was a letter dated January 16 1638, which stated that he once portrayed the exiled duchess of Chevreuse, who was then living in Madrid under the protection of Philip IV. But some art experts argued that no resemblance could be discerned with other portraits of the duchess, and it was assumed that the costume of the woman in The Lady with a Fan revealed a Spanish tapada, which was a precursor to the majas of the 18th century.

Ownership

The Lady with a Fan was first registered in the collection of Lucien Bonaparte in the early 19th century. It is believed that Bonaparte acquired it in Spain when he was there in 1801. But because there was no earlier record of the painting in any Spanish collection, it is also possible that he acquired it either in England or in Italy, where he spent most of the period of the Napoleonic Wars, or even in France, where Bonaparte had an encounter with the then duke of Luynes, a direct descendant of the duchess of Chevreuse. By 1847 the painting was in the Hertford Collection, but it was later acquired by Sir Richard Wallace for his own collection, where it remains.

Lady in a Mantilla

A variant of the portrait, the Lady in a Mantilla, appeared in England before 1753, in an inventory taken at the death of Lord Burlington. This version is on display at Chatsworth. An entry from the 1689 inventory of the marquis of Carpio's collection suggested that the same Chatsworth painting was in the quarta pieza (fourth room) of Carpio's house, known as El Jardin de San Joaquin, where it hung with twenty other portraits of men and women, ten religious paintings, and five mythological and secular subjects.

See also

• Mother Jeronima de la Asuncion, a model for another painting by Velázquez.

References

Specific General

• Zirpolo, Lilian (1994). "Madre Jeronima de la Fuente and Lady with a Fan: Two Portraits by Velazquez Reexamined". Woman's Art Journal 15 (1): 16–21.