French School, Portrait of a Lady in a Lace Cap with Pink Ribbons, 18th Century Oil on Canvas, Framed

The cap is the whole picture. A tower of pleated lace held by a broad pink ribbon, twice as tall as the face beneath it, and everything else in the canvas is quieter than it.

Oil on canvas, relined, 20 x 16 inches (51 x 41 cm), 24 x 19 inches (61 x 48 cm) framed. Unsigned. French, second half of the eighteenth century, in a gilt wood frame.

A woman of middle years turns three quarters to the viewer within a painted oval, her powdered hair dressed high and rolled at the sides. She wears a single strand of pearls at the throat and a pale gown with a deep frill of pleated lace at the neckline, a pink rose and two buds pinned at the breast. The face is worked smooth, with a high colour set on both cheeks. The ground is a plain warm grey that darkens at the corners, so that nothing competes with the cap, the lace and the flowers.

The frame is gilt wood with foliate ornaments applied at the four corners, water gilt, the gilding crazed across the whole surface in the fine regular network of an original gilt surface.

The reverse carries the oval stamp of Léon Berville of Paris, Chaussée d'Antin, dealer in pictures, colours and frames, with two of his printed labels on the frame above. The canvas was relined and the stamp applied at that time, in the nineteenth century.

A cap of the 1770s
The tower of pleated lace held by a ribbon belongs to a narrow window of French fashion, worn with hair dressed high and powdered, and gone within a decade. It places the sitter among women who followed the court at one remove and had themselves painted the way the court was painted, in a feigned oval, at half length, with pearls and a flower.

The paint layer is stable, with small scattered losses. The frame has a break to the moulding on one edge where the gesso shows.