Flemish School, 17th century

This elegant portrait of a finely attired woman was likely painted in Antwerp around 1615. The sitter's black gown with quilted sleeves, a gold stomacher, and lace embroidery, as well as her high fan-shaped headdress, typify early-seventeenth-century fashion in Flanders.

The coat of arms suggest that the sitter's husband was a member of the Sterck family (whose heraldic device of three moors' heads on a gold ground is featured in the lozenge's left side). The woman herself may have been born into the Del Rio family, but the heraldic device in the lozenge's right remains difficult to identify with certainty.