Four Portraits

I went to the National Gallery this weekend and fell in love with these four paintings because the artists have caught the subjects' expressions so well that you feel you can read their thoughts. This is what I believe each one of these women to be thinking.

Bertolome Esteban Murillo

A Girl and Her Duenna, 1670

Girl: Oh yes, I know I am beautiful, what of it? What are you doing?

Duenna: Oh look at him staring so boldly at my young miss! Yes, I know what you're thinking, you dirty old lecherous sonofabitch. You have babies nursing in every kitchen in every great house in Sevilla! Yes you can look, but you just keep on moving along, yes sir . . .

Nicolas de Largilliere
Portrait of Elizabeth Throckmorton, 1729

"I am so beautiful that even a nun's habit cannot contain my inner radiance. I am beautiful at thirty five while your wife is missing hair and teeth and her skin is worn and old from cleaning and washing and caring for your children and it no longer glows like mine. I am off limits. Paint me if you like, but I am out of the reach of any man, protected by this habit, by my vows, by these walls. Put all of your longing for me into your painting, make me rosy and sensual if you like, you cannot touch me. It will be a better painting for that, won't it?"







Judith Leyster
Self portrait, 1630

"I am a professional in a world in which I am first owned by my father and then my husband, in a world in which any money I make belongs to my husband. My children belong to my husband, my body belongs to my husband, but I am still a professional woman. I am not only a professional, I am an artist. I am by that very fact unconventional in a conventional society. Yet here I am, with an easel and a palette, somehow figuring out how to be what I want to be in spite of patriarchal constraints, in spite of my gender's limitations. Aren't I cool? And this painting within a painting, pretty awesome right?"

 Antoine Van Dyk

Marchesa Elena Grimaldi, 1623

"Cower before me, minion, for I could have you chopped into tiny pieces if the whim entered my head. But also, love me, for I am beautiful and intelligent, and have slaves to wait on me and luxurious clothes. I am in every way superior to you and the only reason I permit your presence is so that I will have someone to admire me. Now be off--I am done with you."