Portrait of a Lady in a green velvet and orange dress and a pearl-embroidered black hat

The portrait is also very close stylistically to a beautiful female portrait by Lucas Cranach, the Younger in the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, whose companion portrait is dated 1543. Both portraits show elegant women, resplendent in fine jewelry, their heads slightly turned to the left and with their hands clasped below their waist. Although the pose of the present sitter might suggest that the picture originally had a pendant, none has ever been connected and the direct outward glance of the sitter suggests that that it was equally likely to have been conceived as a single portrait in its own right. Interesting to note is the pronounced pentiment in the drawing of the hands, and infrared reflectography reveals that the position of the hands was moved completely. While Lucas Cranach's portraits of men are very individualized, his portraits of young women seem to represent more of an idealized figure than a specific person. Here, Cranach abandons the earlier localized interior settings of his father's portraits and places his sitter against a stark plain background. This striking simplicity and lack of background detail only enhances its very contemporary aspect.

[Sotheby's online database; http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2011/old-master-and-british-paintings-evening-sale/lot.10.html?locale=en; accessed 19-03-2019]