Portrait of Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia (Anguissola)

[1] Owned by the Museo del Prado, it currently hangs in the Spanish Embassy in Paris.

In 1609 Pedro Paolo De Ribera referred to Anguissola producing a portrait of infanta Isabella during her stop in Genoa en route to Brussels in June 1599[2] He states that infanta "daily spent long hours chatting [with the artist], remembering things which had had happened to her in her tender years".

Anguissola was a portraitist for the Spanish court and also produced a portrait of Isabella's mother Elisabeth of Valois.

Isabella is shown wearing a sumptuous court dress, a large pleated ruff, a pearl necklace, a gold chain with a figure of Francis of Assisi or Anthony of Padua and a girdle studded with pearls, rubies and diamonds, resting her right hand on the back of a chair and her left hand holding a lace-edged handkerchief.

Profoundly religious, she spent her last years in the "Descalzas Reales" monastery and in the habit of a nun, as shown in her later portrait by Rubens.