French School, 17th Century, Circle of Frans Pourbus

Private Collection, France.

The Portrait of Marie de Médicis painted by Van Dyck in 1631 (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux, Inv. Bx E 3) shows a dignified seated woman, despite the difficulties the queen was experiencing at that time. After the failure of the ‘Day of the Dupes’, on 10 November 1630, when her son Louis XIII chose Cardinal Richelieu over her, she went in exile in the Spanish Netherlands. In Van Dyck’s version, it is possible to see behind her the fortress of Het Steen and the tower of the cathedral in Antwerp, where she was staying in late 1631. A replica of this work, probably painted the same year, is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille, inv. P. 58).

This portrait seems to be a reduced version of the original composition, reprising the clothes worn by Marie de Médicis and her confident expression against a dark background. She wears the same black silk dress with a wide white collar; only her jewellery is different: her black earrings and simple gold chain have been replaced with large white pearls, whose nacreous gleam illuminates the queen’s face. This parure is similar to the one worn by Marie de Médicis in the portrait painted by Frans Pourbus in 1613. It is possible that the present work was by the draughtsman and painter Daniel Dumonstier, a portraitist who was much admired by the French aristocracy in the seventeenth century.