Works by Sofonisba Anguissola

Sofonisba Anguissola, from a noble family in Cremona, painted herself and her family informally, her sisters at a game of chess, before going to Madrid as lady-in-waiting to the Spanish queen and her teacher in art.

At fourteen she and her sister Elena were sent to study with the painter Bernardino Campi. As a lady she could not draw from the nude, which kept her from large religious and history scenes, so she worked on new ways of posing a portrait instead. In Portrait of the Artist's Sisters Playing Chess, painted in 1555 when she was 23, three sisters in rich dress sit at the board, the small girl in the middle grinning and an older woman leaning in from the right. In the Portrait Group with the Artist's Father, Brother and Sister, from the late 1550s, a boy in red looks up at his seated father, a shaggy white dog at his heels.

She painted herself many times, since her fame made portraits of her much in demand. The 1556 Self-portrait at an Easel shows her as the painter, brush in hand, at work on a Virgin kissing the Child. In the Miniature Self Portrait, oil on parchment, she holds up a large medallion whose monogram may spell her father's name or the family motto. Her Spanish court years, from 1559, are harder to judge: by one account only one surviving work from then is securely hers, and a portrait of Philip II was long given to Coello or to Juan Pantoja de la Cruz. Later in life she turned again to religious subjects, and the oval Madonna Suckling the Infant Christ dates from 1598.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, National Museum in Poznań, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, Nivaagaard Museum, Łańcut Castle, Museum of Fine Arts Boston.