Jacqueline van Caestre

According to Nora de Poorter, the Łazienki painting is a copy of
a lost original, which showed the sitter in the same knee-length format.
This original, painted in c. 1618, was the work of Rubens or
a young van Dyck. An autograph replica of this putative original,
reduced to half-length, like its pendant (portrait of her husband), is
in the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels (inv. no.
2619; oak panel, 72 x 57 cm).

Jacqueline came from a wealthy patrician family; her father, Jan van
Caestre, was a member of the municipal authorities in Mechelen. Her
husband, Jean-Charles de Cordes, was from a noble family, one of the
wealthiest in Antwerp. She was his third wife. Their marriage took place
on 3 October 1617, and Jacqueline died in June 1618. The lost prototype
of the Brussels replica and the Łazienki copy, together with its pendant—the portrait of the husband, must therefore have been made afterthe sitter’s marriage or on the occasion of it, and therefore between
the end of 1617 and mid 1618.