Lady at the dressing table

The toilette of a noble lady is the theme of this panel, no doubt underlining the customs of the inhabitants of the space where this composition was applied: Quinta das Portas de Ferro in Camarate. The fact that we are in the presence of one of the elements of a vaster set in the National Azulejo Museum, whilst not enabling us to reconstitute its iconographic programme, allows us to conclude that this is a gallant scene, revealing the daily life of the aristocracy. The other scenes allude to a dance in the woods, a music lesson, a composition organised around the penning of a letter and also the fragment of another panel with a lady looking at a small portrait. These works have been attributed to Master P.M.P., a painter with a conventional name included in the Cycle of the Masters, in the area of detailed painting, of which Lady at the Dressing-table is a good example. The author may have been inspired on an engraving, for some of the panels in this set are repeated in works that have also been attributed to him, as is the case of one of the rooms in the Palace of the Marquises of Minas in Bairro Alto, Lisbon. The actual frame, which is imposing and has great scenographic effect, is also usual in the works by P.M.P., with its prominent female figures with baskets of flowers and fruit and angels playing trumpets that frame the central composition with scrolls.