Portrait of a Woman

Robert Campin's Portrait of a Woman is the companion piece to his Portrait of a Man, and together they represent a remarkable pair of middle-class portraits from early fifteenth-century Flanders. The woman's white head-cloth, precisely folded over a dark hood, is rendered with the same meticulous attention to fabric texture that Campin brings to every surface he paints. Her direct, unsmiling gaze has none of the courtly decorousness of aristocratic portraiture; this is a real woman, observed without flattery, whose physiognomy tells us more about the lived reality of Flemish bourgeois life than any number of more celebrated court portraits.

The sitter is depicted in the characteristic three-quarter format with a white linen headdress, her features rendered with the unflinching naturalism that characterizes Campin's portraiture, using subtle oil glazes to model flesh tones.