Signs of identity in Lady with a Fan by Diego Velazquez: costume and likeness reconsidered - Critical Essay

Renowned as a great portraitist in the seventeenth hundred the Spaniard Diego Velazquez stands with Rembrandt as an artist whose works can be viewed as wordless essays upon the human condition. In addition to serving as records of likeness, greatest in quantity portraits are repositories of ball of threads to the values that brought artist and sitter together. Velazquez's portraits are arresting and memorable images that invite exploration of the circumstances of their making, which leads to a more informed reading of the artist's work. The analysis of Lady with a Fan can be seen as a case research that expands our ways of understanding and thinking about early fresh portraiture.

The Lady with a Fan is an enigmatic work among portraits through Velazquez (Fig. 1). As painter to Philip IV of Spain, Velazquez principally recorded the appearance of members of the Spanish royal family and the high nobility, figures that are easy to recognize. However, the sitter in Lady with a Fan has not at the same time been convincingly identified, despite attempts to do in like manner perhaps because crucial signs in the portrait have been misinterpreted. The portrait itself is our greatest in quantity reliable evidence for the collision between the artist and sitter, as little documentary information has approach to light. The details of the style of dress that will be analyzed below advise the sitter is dressed according to French fashion of the late 1630 Therefore, the possibility exists that she is a Frenchwoman. The sole reference indicating that Velazquez painted a Frenchwoman is set in a letter dated January 16 1638 which states that he was portraying the exiled duchess of Chevreuse, then living in Madrid beneath the protection of Philip IV. (1) Until now, identifying the woman in Lady with a Fan with Marie de Rohan, duchess of Chevreuse (1600-1679) has been passed above for two reasons. First, it was believed that no resemblance could be discerned with other portraits of the duchess, and next to the first it was assumed that her style of dress revealed a Spanish tapada (a precursor to the popular majas of the eighteenth century) or a member of Velazquez's possess family. Arguments can now be marshaled that clarify the couple likeness and costume and, concomitantly, the significance of attitude and gesture, all of which lead to a novel reading of the image.

Lady with a Fan, while accepted as a painting through Velazquez, is distinctly short upon early documents. On the basis of its place in Velazquez's stylistic exhibition the portrait has been dated to 1638-39 and it was first registered in the collection of Lucien Bonaparte in the early nineteenth hundred (2) It has been assumed that he acquired it in Spain when he was there in 1801 As no earlier record of the painting in any Spanish collection exists, however, it is possible that he acquired it either in England or in Italy, where he wearied most of the period of the Napoleonic Wars, or smooth in France, as suggested through the episode between the then duke of Luyne a direct descendant of the duchess of Chevreuse, and Lucien Bonaparte. While at dinner in the latter's house, the duke of Luyne recognized upon his host's walls two pictures that had formerly belonged to him, and that "he had been obliged to barter to antique dealers, in the time of sequestrations, imprisonments, and immigrations." (3) Lucien Bonaparte promptly had the pictures taken down and get backed to the duke. Unfortunately, no positive evidence remains that Lady with a Fan was at any time inventoried in any of the family collections. The duchess of Chevreuse passed her Paris house to the son born of her first marriage and retired to the abbey at Gagny in 1663. (4) Any inventories made at the time of this quality transfer have been lost. by dint of 1847 the painting was in the Hertford Collection, later forming part of the Wallace Collection. A variant of the portrait, believed to have approach to England before 1753, when it appeared in the inventory taken at the death of Lord Burlington, now resides at Chatsworth (Fig. 2) (5) An entrance in the 1689 inventory of the marquis of Carpio's collection--"A painting of a woman with a black lace veil upon her head, with a square lace collar, and golden dress with black stripes, an original by the agency of Diego Velazquez, one and individual third vara in height, and individual half and a sixth in width, framed, 1000 reales"--seems to identify the Chatsworth painting. (6) This portrait was in the quarta pieza (fourth room) of Carpio's house El Jardin de San Joaquin, where it hung with a certain number of twenty other portraits of men and women about ten religious paintings, and five mythological or secular subdues (7) The intriguing relationship between the sum of two units versions will be discussed below.

When we stand before the painted image of a human being and attempt to penetrate the character, assess the status, and identify qualities of the personality showed to our eyes, we imitate the collision between the sitter and the artist. Besides the face, visual simple bodys that accompany it act upon us in our interpretation of the sitter. (8) Awareness of the conventions of representation with which the pair artist and sitter were flowing will enrich our reading of the image, and in the case of Velazquez, illuminate the "episodio biografico" (biographical episode) within the portrait. (9) As in all human collisions there must have been expectations upon both sides. The sitter, presumably, was desirous of being portrayed and perhaps curious to diocese how she would be perceived by the agency of a celebrated professional. She might well have had a clear notion of in what way she wished to be seen or the collection of laws of her social class may have dictated the manner of her representation. The artist would investigation his subject, analyze her form, and take her physical and metaphorical measure. Sympathy--or its absence--between artist and sitter might influence the representation, although this subjective quality would be difficult to assess historically. The compounded ritual of portraiture in the seventeenth hundred relied on a series of theatrical conventions that be deriveded in an image more layered and compos than the pieces of reality we capture at the not away time in spontaneous or random snapshots. (10)