A Woman with Prayer Beads

A well-dressed young woman gazes out from this portrait. Her chemise seems to be embroidered in black and gold at the neck and cuffs, and she wears a golden necklace and gold rings set with stones. The golden beads among other whitish ones that hang from her girdle are probably a rosary, a devotional aid often used for prayer.We don‘t know who the woman is or the identity of the rather incompetent painter, although the portrait has been attributed to Catharina van Hemessen. It doesn’t look much like her Portrait of a Man or her Portrait of a Woman, although admittedly all are very small and not very expertly done. In this picture the woman’s head and hands are very large in proportion to her torso; Catharina’s man and woman are more naturalistically proportioned and their hands better drawn. The scribbled underdrawing in this picture does not relate to Catharina’s portraits, where there is no underdrawing.The sitter’s turned-back sleeves and the girdle tied around her waist with the beads attached were fashionable in the 1540s. It’s hard to say where the picture was painted; it may have been in Antwerp or elsewhere in the southern Netherlands.