Dutch school; 17th century. "Portrait of a lady. Oil on panel. It presents faults and restorations. Measurements: 41 x 34,5 cm; 55,5 x 49 cm (frame). The delicacy of the stroke and a skill in the handling of the drawing of the author reveal the portrait of a young lady. Despite the sobriety of the scene, which consists only of the bust of the sitter, the piece stands out for its quality, elegance and subtlety in such a way as to create a very psychologically charged scene, where we can intuit the personality of the young woman, whose clothes and ornaments subtly reveal her high social position to the viewer. The large ruff, the ornate headdress that gathers her hair, the pearl in her earring and even the freshness of her cheeks confirm her status. It was undoubtedly in the paintings of the Dutch school that the consequences of the political emancipation of the region and the economic prosperity of the liberal bourgeoisie were most overtly manifested. The combination of the discovery of nature, objective observation, the study of the concrete, the appreciation of the everyday, the taste for the real and the material, the sensitivity to the apparently insignificant, meant that the Dutch artist was at one with the reality of everyday life, without seeking any ideal that was alien to that same reality. The painter did not seek to transcend the present and the materiality of objective nature or to escape from tangible reality, but to envelop himself in it, to become intoxicated by it through the triumph of realism, a realism of pure illusory fiction, achieved thanks to a perfect, masterly technique and a conceptual subtlety in the lyrical treatment of light. As a result of the break with Rome and the iconoclastic tendency of the Reformed Church, paintings with religious themes were eventually eliminated as a decorative complement with a devotional purpose, and mythological stories lost their heroic and sensual tone in accordance with the new society. Portraits, landscapes and animals, still lifes and genre painting were the thematic formulas that became valuable in their own right and, as objects of domestic furniture - hence the small size of the paintings - were acquired by individuals from almost all social classes and classes of society.