Portrait of a Young Girl (Christus)

A very similar style, with no tail, is seen on the older of two girls in the donor panels of Presentation of Christ by the Master of the Prado Adoration of the Magi, a pupil of Rogier van der Weyden.

He reduces the emphasis on volume of those artists, in favour of an elongation of form; the narrow, slight upper body and head are, according to the German art historian Robert Suckale, "heightened by the V-shaped neckline of the ermine and the cylindrical hat.

"[4] Further, while the first generation of Early Netherlandish painters benefited from the patronage of the newly emerging middle class, secularising portraiture, and removing it from the preserve of royalty, Christus renders the girl as aristocratic, haughty, sophisticated, and exquisitely dressed.

[4] In a letter dated 1824 or 1825 Gustav Waagen, later Director of the Berlin Museums, gave his interpretation of Latin inscriptions he had seen on the original frame of the portrait, which was subsequently lost.

[1] She may have travelled to Bruges to attend the famously lavish wedding in 1468 of Margaret of York, sister of Edward IV of England, to Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.

[17] The earliest extant record of the painting is in a 1492 inventory of the Medici family, where it is described as a small panel bust of a French lady, coloured in oil, the work of Pietro Cresci of Bruges.

[21] In the 20th century Erwin Panofsky was instrumental in furthering Christus' reputation as a major 15th-century northern painter, described the work as an "enchanting, almost French-looking portrait", perhaps noting the resemblance to the virgin in Jean Fouquet's Melun Diptych.

Sterling picks up on this, noting the many similarities between the two women, including their tightly pulled-back hair, high cheek bones, slanted eyes and sulky expressions.

In this way, Waagen also identified Christus' so-called Saint Eligius panel, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (and seen as just a portrait of a goldsmith), marking the painter's rediscovery after centuries of obscurity.

[22] Before this identification, a number of his paintings had been attributed to Jan van Eyck, but became identified with Christus after Waagen established him as a distinct and separate master.

[14][23] Over the next century sketches of Christus' biography were constructed, as art historians – notably Panofsky – slowly disentangled his works from those of van Eyck.

Max Friedländer proposed a number of dates and an ordering of works in the 1957 volume of his Early Netherlandish painting, but many of his assumptions were discounted by Otto Pächt just a few years later.