A Young Princess by Jan Gossaert was created in 1530 – 1532. The painting is in National Gallery London. The size of the work is 38,2 x 29,1 cm and is made of oil on wood.
About the Work
A young girl, her clothes sewn with hundreds of pearls, gazes out at us. She seems to be playing with a golden object made of concentric rings. This is an armillary sphere, a celestial globe showing the movement of the heavenly bodies. Its interlocking circles are echoed in the decoration of her clothes.
The girl seems to be about nine or ten years old. The richness of her dress shows that she was royalty, and the blue parts of the sleeves were originally purple – a royal colour. The shape of the sleeves and the curve of the neckline suggest a date of around 1530. The only young girls in the Low Countries who might have appeared in such splendid clothes at this date were Dorothea and Christina, daughters of Christian II, exiled King of Denmark. The family came to the Netherlands in 1523 when their father was deposed, and were cared for by Margaret of Austria. Gossart painted Dorothea with her siblings in 1526. In that picture (now in the Royal Collection, London) she has a high forehead, widely spaced eyes and frizzy hair – like the sitter here. Read more in National Gallery London
About the Artist
Jan Gossaert (c. 1478 – 1 October 1532) was a French-speaking painter from the Low Countries also known as Jan Mabuse (the name he adopted from his birthplace, Maubeuge) or Jennyn van Hennegouwe (Hainaut), as he called himself when he matriculated in the Guild of Saint Luke, at Antwerp, in 1503. He was one of the first painters of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting to visit Italy and Rome, which he did in 1508–09, and a leader of the style known as Romanism, which brought elements of Italian Renaissance painting to the north, sometimes with a rather awkward effect. He achieved fame across at least northern Europe, and painted religious subjects, including large altarpieces, portraits and mythological subjects. Read more in Wikipedia
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