Portrait of Anne of Austria (1601-1666), Queen of France

Entry

The sitter, Doña Ana Maria Mauricia (1601-1666), Infanta of Spain and Portugal and Archduchess of Austria, was the daughter of King Philip III of Spain and Margaret, Archduchess of Austria, sister of the Emperor, Ferdinand II. Anne (in the French and English spelling) married King Louis XIII of France in 1615, and was commonly referred to thereafter as ‘Anne d’Autriche’. She did not bear a child – the future Louis XIV – until 1638. In 1643, she became Regent of France until Louis attained his majority in 1651. The identification of the sitter is discussed below.

The appearance of the queen, depicted here as a young woman, is borne out by the description in the memoirs of her then companion Françoise Langlois de Motteville:

‘At the time when I was sent away [1627] she wore her hair in the fashion of a round coiffure, transparently frizzed, and with much powder; after that she took to curls. Her hair had grown rather darker in colour, and she had a great quantity of it. Her features were not delicate, having even the defect of too thick a nose, and she wore, in the Spanish fashion, too much rouge; but she was fair, and never was there a finer skin than hers. Her eyes were perfectly beautiful; gentleness and majesty united in them; their colour, mingled with green, and her glance the more vivid and full of all the charms that Nature gave them. Her mouth was small and rosy, the smile admirable, and the lips had only enough of the Austrian family to make them more beautiful than many that claimed to be more perfect. The shape of her face was handsome and the forehead well made. Her hands and arms were of surpassing beauty, and all Europe has heard their praises; their whiteness, without exaggeration, equalled that of snow; poets could not say enough when they wished to praise them. Her bust was very fine, without being quite perfect. She was tall, and her bearing lofty but not haughty. She had great charm in the expression of her face, and her beauty imprinted in the hearts of those who saw her a tenderness which did not lack the accompaniment of veneration and respect. Besides these perfections, she had the piety of her mother Queen Marguerite of Austria.’⁷

The queen could have sat to Peter Paul Rubens only when the artist was in Paris: first from circa 11 January to circa 26 February 1622, during his negotiations with the Dowager Queen Marie de Médicis to decorate two galleries in her Luxembourg Palace, about which Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc wrote from Paris 14 April 1622; second between early May and the end of June 1623 when he delivered the first tranche of the cycle of paintings for Marie de Médicis; and third from March to May 1625, when he supervised the installation of pictures in the first gallery in the Luxembourg Palace and participated in the festivities celebrating the wedding by proxy of Louis XIII’s sister, Henrietta-Maria, to King Charles I of Great Britain. Rubens later passed through Paris secretly in early September 1628 on his way to Madrid, and fleetingly on his return to Antwerp in May 1629.⁸

There has not been unanimity over the status of the Rijksmuseum portrait, which is closely related to that in the Louvre,⁹ from which it differs most notably in the architectural background, and its placement, in the nosegay and in the presentation of the sitter who is here depicted in larger format. While Jaffé excluded both pictures from his catalogue raisonné of 1989 and Glück believed both were copies of a lost original,¹⁰ most authorities, following Rooses, have preferred the Louvre version.¹¹ However, Burchard favoured the Rijksmuseum picture;¹² his view was followed by Huemer in her volume of the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard.¹³ This favoured status, recently reaffirmed by Van Hout¹⁴ – that the face was reworked by Rubens – is likely as not to be too generous. The competing claims of the two portraits were settled in 2017-18 as they were hung side by side in the Musée du Luxembourg, when it became clear that there was little to choose between them.¹⁵

Rooses regarded the Amsterdam portrait as a competent product of the studio; Oldenbourg suggested that it might have been executed there by Justus van Egmont (1602-1674),¹⁶ who was a member of Rubens’s studio perhaps from circa 1623 to 1628/29 and was later to specialize in portraiture.¹⁷ Recently Ost has attributed both the Louvre and Rijksmuseum portraits to Cornelis de Vos (1584-1651), drawing attention to documented examples of De Vos collaborating with Rubens in the 1620s; but none of these works, as opposed to examples in the 1630s, is extant.¹⁸ Although a distinct personality – displaying a robust interpretation of Rubens’s manner – seems to attribute both portraits, it seems not convincingly identifiable as that of Cornelis de Vos. Therefore, in our present state of knowledge it is best to attribute both to the studio of Rubens as did Mandrella in the Musée du Luxembourg catalogue.

Although the Louvre portrait was described as depicting Anne of Austria in the Le Brun and Bailly inventories¹⁹ of the collection of Louis XIV, there was no unanimity as to the identity of the sitter and such was also the case concerning the Rijksmuseum version. While alternative identifications – as Marie de Médicis and Infanta Maria Anna, the daughter of Philip III who became the wife of Emperor Ferdinand III – have been ruled out, it has to be said that the sitter does not closely resemble Rubens’s other renderings of Anne of Austria. However, the French royal inventories should be deemed authoritative, especially as both were compiled in the lifetime of the sitter’s son.

Huemer, following Burchard, listed three portrait types of Anne of Austria by Rubens: the three-quarter-length, seated portrait in the Museo Nacional del Prado;²⁰ the three-quarter-length standing portrait in the Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena,²¹ and the present picture (or rather, in the light of the above, both it and the Louvre version). She mistakenly believed that the Norton Simon portrait was the prototype for the engraving published by Soutman.²²

According to Huemer the Prado portrait is the earliest, having been painted in Paris in 1622. Along with the Prado Portrait of the Dowager Queen Marie de Médicis, she identified these two with those referred to by Peiresc in a letter to Rubens of 14 April 1622 as having been received by the Archduchess Isabella,²³ and later with nos. 166 and 167 in the Specification of works for sale from the artist’s collection after his death.²⁴ She placed the Louvre/Rijksmuseum type after the Pasadena portrait, which can be dated to 1623 by virtue of the engraving based on the head and shoulders of its pendant, Louis XIII; she thus implied that the former was executed in Paris in 1625 or was based on a study of the queen made then. In contrast, Rooses dated the Louvre/Rijksmuseum portrait 1620-25 and that in the Prado to 1625. Indeed, the sitter looks younger in the former. Her face also differs in having larger eyes and being more oblong, with a pronounced jaw. However, her hair seems the more powdered and frizzed in the Prado portrait; according to Madame de Motteville, this was the fashion first favoured by the Queen, and she wears black (perhaps in mourning for her father, Philip III, who died in 1621).

The present portrait is on a composite support of three pieces of oak timber from the Baltic area. Only two of the planks can be dated dendrochronologically; analysis of the other two places a possible earliest use of the support from 1623, but more probably from 1629. The latter year is in the middle of Rubens’s sojourn abroad. As it seems very improbable that the portrait dates from after he reopened his Antwerp studio in 1630, a date circa 1628 seems most likely for the painting. Thus it seems likely that both it and the Louvre version are inferior studio derivations of a likeness made by Rubens of the queen in 1625, which is no longer extant, but which was listed in the Specification of works of art for sale from Rubens’s collection after his death: ‘[no.] ‘120 Un pourtrait de la Reyne regnante de France sur fond de bois.’²⁵ Whether it was also the prototype for the portrait owned by the Duke of Buckingham (d. 1628) – having perhaps been one of the paintings sold by Rubens to the duke in 1626/27 – must remain an open question.²⁶

Gordenker has described the costume in which the virago slashed sleeves and the ruff are notable.²⁷ A similar ruff is worn by Madame de Vicq in her portrait by Rubens in the Tel Aviv Museum.²⁸ The sitter there was the wife of Archduchess Isabella’s ambassador to Louis XIII, Henri de Vicq, who was en poste in Paris from at least 1622 to 1628 and whose portrait in the Louvre Rubens painted as a pendant.²⁹ A similar collar but with rounded rather than pointed lobes is depicted in the portrait of Marie de Médicis by Frans Pourbus II (1569-1622) of 1617 in the Prado;³⁰ she wore a similar decorated but fan shaped collar in Pourbus’s portrait of the previous year in the Art Institute of Chicago,³¹ and the same motif decorated the collar of the duchess of Buckingham in Rubens’s portrait at Dulwich, made in 1625, which was perhaps based on a portrait miniature of the sitter.³²

An unusual feature is the nosegay in the sitter’s right hand; female sitters were sometimes depicted cradling or clasping roses, but a nosegay such as this held by a royal sitter seems unusual if not unprecedented. It is depicted in a manner reminiscent of still lifes by Jan Brueghel I, but is not obviously by a different hand from the rest of the painting.

Rubens’s depictions of the sitter in the Prado and Louvre/Rijksmuseum portraits are distinguished by her informal placing in a rich, pillared and palatial interior of gilded, grey stone. That in the Prado portrait has been identified as the Hall of the Caryatids, designed by Pierre Lescot (c. 1515-1578) in the Louvre.³³ The background of the Rijksmuseum picture has the same prominent pediment supported by three Corinthian capitals with an alcove beyond; more elaborate, but also unlikely to be identifiable is the whereabouts of the archway topped by a sculpted bust of a hero leading to a doorway, in the background of the portrait in the Louvre.

Gregory Martin, 2022