Caterine’s pose has an almost sculptural monumentality, and here wealth and austerity sit side by side for the richness of her two gold bracelets, her gemstone rings and the pendant cross with baroque pearl drops belie the costume’s relative simplicity, as do the discreet jet beads that gently gleam from its trimmings. Recent study by infrared reflectology and X-ray has revealed the artist used significant underpainting which is covering any underdrawing that might be there. These preparatory paint layers are worked in a very precise and controlled manner through the application of many short strokes to build up the modelling of physiognomy with remarkable verisimilitude. A major pentiment has also been confirmed with the heavy gold chain that she wears having been reworked by the artist to give a prominence to the sitter’s hands. It is almost certain that this portrait must have been a pendant to a now lost portrait of her second husband François de Groote who was a Juris sciens (doctor of law), and who died c.1604. Caterine lived to be eighty-two, a remarkable old age for the time, and was herself ultimately buried in 1622 in the church’s Sacramentskapel.

First identified by Mark Weiss as the work of Pourbus in 1997, this is an important early portrait commission from only a handful by the artist, which date from the very first years of his working life in Antwerp between 1591 and 1594. This powerful portrayal of a woman prematurely aged, makes for an excellent juxtaposition with the artist’s early masterpiece, painted in the same year, of an Unknown Man aged 56 (previously with The Weiss Gallery, now on loan to the National Gallery, London) [details below]. Both are painted with a technique of the highest order and an unerring degree of naturalism, their skin and hair revealed as if under a microscope. They can be regarded as the culmination of the great artistic traditions the artist had inherited, after which he would go on to develop his own distinctive style as court painter in following two decades.