Portrait of a Seated Woman

Anthonis Mor · c. 1565

Medium

Oil on panel, mounted on aluminum sheet

Original size

121.8 × 88.8 cm (48 × 34 15/16 in.); Framed: 151.2 × 120.1 × 10.2 cm (59 1/2 × 47 1/4 × 4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Mannerism

Portrait of a Seated Woman holds its power in restraint — the sitter's composed gaze and the quiet authority of her bearing speak across four and a half centuries. Anthonis Mor was among the most sought-after portraitists of sixteenth-century Europe, working for the Spanish Habsburg court and numerous noble patrons across the Low Countries, England, and Iberia. His technique drew on the Flemish tradition of meticulous surface description — the sheen of silk, the weight of jewellery, the translucency of skin — while bringing a psychological directness that set him apart from more ceremonial court painters of the period. Working on panel, he built up his forms with measured, almost invisible brushwork, lending his subjects a solidity that photographs of the works still struggle to fully convey. Mor's reputation was international enough that Philip II of Spain retained him as his principal portraitist, a distinction few Flemish painters of the era achieved. This hand-painted oil reproduction replicates that same patient process — layers of pigment built up on a surface that rewards close looking, capturing not just the composition but the material presence that makes standing before the original a genuinely different experience from seeing it reproduced on a screen.