Marchesa Elena Grimaldi Cattaneo

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Artist: Anthony van Dyck (Flemish, 1599–1641)
Medium: oil on canvas
Size: overall: 242.9 × 138.5 cm (95 5/8 × 54 1/2 in.); framed: 271.46 × 166.37 × 12.7 cm (106 7/8 × 65 1/2 × 5 in.)
Museum: National Gallery of Art
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

A tall woman with pale white skin and a shorter man with brown skin stand on a terrace in this vertical, full-length portrait. At the center, the woman wears a voluminous, long-sleeved, black dress with a row of gold buttons down the bodice. She has a wide, gray ruffled collar at her neck and red ruffled cuffs at her wrists. Her brown hair is pulled back under a cap ornamented with rows of white pearls. She looks at us close-lipped down the bridge of her straight nose.

She holds a sprig of orange blossoms in her right hand, on our left. The second person leans into the space from our right as he reaches to hold a crimson-red parasol over and behind the woman’s head. He is cleanshaven with short, dark hair and brown eyes. He wears an amber-yellow garment over a white shirt. Fluted columns rise along the right edge of the composition, and the terrace is enclosed with a low balustrade. Plants surround the woman's feet, and a distant landscape below a blue sky is visible to our left.