Elizabeth Throckmorton, Canoness of the Order of the Dames Augustines Anglaises by Largillierre, Nicolas de

This is a portrait of Elizabeth Throckmorton, Canoness of the Order of the Dames Augustines Anglaises. Painted in 1729 by Nicolas de Largillierre, it lives today in the National Gallery of Victoria. The most arresting feature is not her calm, direct gaze, but the inscription at the top of the canvas that permanently fixes her name and title.

Look first at her eyes. Largillierre painted them with a sharp intelligence and a faint melancholy, the look of a woman entirely aware she is being observed. Then let your eye travel upward to the dark band above her veil. A Latin inscription runs across the canvas, hidden in plain sight, naming her and her station. It is the painter's deliberate choice to make her identity unlosable.

Elizabeth Throckmorton belonged to the English Augustinian canonesses, a contemplative order of women living in exile in Paris. Portraits of nuns were rare in 18th-century France, and ones this finely painted even rarer. The crisp white coif, the heavy black outer veil, and the prayer book in her folded hands all speak to her vocation. Largillierre, one of the great portraitists of the French Baroque, gave her the same luminous attention he gave to aristocrats.

The modern eye often scrolls past a calm portrait of a nun. But the inscription insists we pause and remember a specific woman, in a specific year, with a specific life.