Portrait of a Seated Woman

The painting was created around 1565, during Mor's mature period when he had returned to the Netherlands from the Spanish court and focused increasingly on portraits of citizens, especially merchants and their wives in Antwerp. The provenance is well documented: Sir Richard Worsley, Bart. (d. 1805), owned it at Appuldurcombe, Isle of Wight, by 1804, as pendant to a Portrait of a Seated Man. It descended to his niece Henrietta Anna Maria Charlotte Bridgeman, who in 1806 married Charles, 2nd Baron Yarborough (later Earl of Yarborough), at Brocklesby Park, Lincolnshire, and London. It then descended to Charles, 4th Earl of Yarborough. Robert Langton Douglas of London later owned it, followed by Knoedler, New York, in October 1916. Andrew W. Mellon of Pittsburgh acquired it from July to December 1918, after which it returned to Knoedler in 1918. J. Horace Harding (d. 1929) of New York purchased it in 1925 and lent it to an exhibition in London in 1927. After Harding's death, his estate retained it, with Knoedler handling it from September to December 1937. It was sold at Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, on March 1, 1941, as lot 57, to Knoedler as agent for the Art Institute of Chicago, which acquired it through the Edward E. Ayer Fund with the reference number 1941.29. The work remains on view at the Art Institute.

Antonis Mor, also known as Anthonis Mor van Dashorst and Antonio Moro, was born in Utrecht between 1516 and 1520 and trained under Jan van Scorel. He became court painter to Philip II of Spain and worked for courts across Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands. His formal style for court portraits, largely based on Titian, was extremely influential on court painters across Europe, especially in the Iberian Peninsula, where it created a tradition that led to Diego Velázquez. Mor's approach was largely determined by his patrons and commissions; as one scholar notes, observation was more important than imagination in his work. The Portrait of a Seated Woman belongs to his later period, after his return from the Spanish court around 1561, when he shifted focus to Antwerp's merchant class. This kind of bourgeois portrait, made popular by Mor, was soon adopted by Antwerp painters and was more fully developed in the seventeenth century, especially in Holland. The painting is catalogued in Northern European and Spanish Paintings before 1600 in the Art Institute of Chicago: A Catalogue of the Collection (Yale University Press, 2008, pp. 260-64), authored by Martha Wolff, Susan Frances Jones, Richard G. Mann and Judith Berg Sobré, with contributions by Ilse Hecht, Peter Klein, Cynthia Kuniej Berry, and Larry Silver.

The Portrait of a Seated Woman endures as a significant example of Mor's influence on European portraiture. His template for aristocratic and bourgeois portraiture influenced painters across Europe for generations, with particular impact in Spain and the Netherlands. The painting's pendant pair structure, with the husband's portrait now in the North Carolina Museum of Art, exemplifies the marital portrait tradition that became standard in Netherlandish and later Dutch art. The work's afterlife in scholarship is anchored by its inclusion in the authoritative Art Institute of Chicago catalogue, and it continues to be studied as a prime example of how Mor adapted courtly conventions for non-aristocratic sitters, thereby expanding the social range of formal portraiture. Its current display at the Art Institute of Chicago ensures its continued visibility and role in public understanding of sixteenth-century Netherlandish painting.