Date: 27-06-2004
Owning Institution: The Wallace Collection
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: 17th Century        

Earlier this week the Unicorn Press published the new complete catalogue of the Wallace Collection’s pictures, by Stephen Duffy and Jo Hedley, so to mark the occasion today’s picture is one of my favourite paintings from that small but almost perfectly formed museum: The Lady with a Fan, painted by Diego Velazquez in approximately 1638-9.

 In fact this week’s column might be regarded as a modest supplement, of sorts, to the brief entry on the painting in the new Wallace Collection catalogue, since some very recent research – too recent to have been incorporated in that publication – has shed fascinating new light on this tremblingly beautiful but rather enigmatic portrait. The identity of the sitter has long been a mystery, as Jo Hedley states in her text. But that mystery may have been solved by the art historian Zahira Veliz, who published her long and convincingly detailed hypothesis in the March 2004 edition of the Art Bulletin.

Veliz’s theory, ultimately unprovable but undeniably attractive, rests principally on two different types of circumstantial evidence, on the one hand documentary, and on the other sartorial. The costume of the sitter appears to be partly Spanish, in that the lady wears a manto de humo, a dark veil made from a flimsy and transparent material, of a type commonly worn by members of the Spanish nobility. But other elements of her clothing suggest that she is dressed in a style much more closely associated with French fashions of the period. The decollete neckline of her dress, sufficiently low cut to reveal a trace of cleavage, was typically French, whereas Spanish female costume of the time was much stricter and stiffer. Indeed, as Veliz points out, “not a single portrait from the 1630s and 1640s shows a Spanish lady with her breasts revealed”. The rosary that dangles from her left wrist was commonly worn by Spanish and French women alike, while her lace cuffs and gloves are similarly inconclusive, being fashionable accessories throughout Europe at the time. But the muted browns of her dress are in accordance with the French taste for sombre fabrics in the 1630s, while her fan may also be seen as a typically French touch. According to Veliz, “Frenchwomen’s fans are frequently depicted ‘in action’, in contrast to the occasional Spanish examples, when the fans are usually closed and held still.”

The other evidence which may have a bearing on the picture – and which led Veliz to investigate its Frenchness, or otherwise, so assiduously – is a document of 1638 recording that “Diego Velazquez is painting the Duchess of Chevreuse’s portrait with a French air and dress”. Given that Velazquez was not an exceptionally prolific painter, that the date is right, and so is the age of the sitter, Veliz concludes that the Duchess of Chevreuse and the woman in the painting may well be one and the same person.
This is a tantalising possibility, all the more so because the Duchess of Chevreuse was such a colourful character, and the events that led her to Spain in the late 1630s might almost have come from the pages of a historical novel. Born in 1600, she was an intimate friend of Anne of Austria, the Spanish-born Queen of France, but thanks to her political intrigues she made an enemy of Louis XIII’s prime minister, Cardinal Richelieu. In late 1637 his dislike for her hardened to the extent that she felt obliged to flee the country and seek refuge in Spain. She hoped that Anne’s brother, Philip IV, would offer her protection, and so it turned out.

On September 7, 1637, the Duchess departed from Touraine disguised as a young man, accompanied only by two grooms. She made for the Spanish border, reaching the Pyrenees at the end of the month, where she crossed into Spain to a monastic hospice in the mountains. From there she went to Zaragoza and then to Guadalajara, eventually reaching Madrid on December 6, where she was received “with honour and affection” by the king and queen of Spain. Spain was at war with France at the time, so the Duchess decided that staying in Madrid for too long might prejudice her chances of returning, one day, to her native country. She remained at the Spanish court during December and January, where she was entertained by the masqued balls and bullfights that preceded the season of Lent. But in early spring she departed for England, where she was to spend two more years of her exile, which lasted until both Richelieu and Louis XIII had shuffled off this mortal coil. Charles I treated her with royal hospitality, lending her some of his own paintings to decorate her house, including a Judith and Holofernes by Guido Reni that she hung above her fireplace. The subject of that picture, a woman defying a tyrant, may in the circumstances have had a personal meaning for her.

Zahira Veliz’s identification of The Lady with the Fan as the Duchess of Chevreuse might not stand up in a court of law. But I find it persuasive. The painter shows us a lady dressed in the French style but wearing a distinctly Spanish veil. The Duchess of Chevreuse was  proud to be French, but given that she had fled her country dressed as a man it seems plausible that her costume – obtained, presumably, on her arrival in Spain – should have acquired an hispanic flavour. Velazquez has her absently pulling that Spanish veil closer, a gesture which has a defensive character – matched by the wistful, slightly lost expression in her beautifully painted face – which would have been perfectly in keeping with the Duchess de Chevreuse’s predicament. The painter clearly found her highly attractive and there is an almost explosively erotic charge to the way in which he has painted her cleavage, an unfamiliar and therefore presumably doubly arousing sight in Spanish aristocratic circles, accentuated here with an emphatic but descriptively excessive smudge of brilliant white impasto. When stories attach themselves to pictures they make us see them differently; and now when I look at Velazquez’s Lady with a Fan I see a tender, poignant but also simmeringly erotic portrait of a damsel in distress.