Portrait of Anne de la Rochefoucauld (c. 1495-1554), bust-length

It is likely that the present drawing relates to a lost painting or its preliminary drawing by Jean Clouet or an artist in his circle. This suggestion is supported by the existence of another version held in the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, Paris, as part of the Receuil des arts et metiers, a group of 128 portraits of the royal family and nobility of the 16th Century that came from the Abbaye Saint-Victor (Pt. F. Me 3 Res (II,1(1)).

Anne de La Rochefoucauld (c. 1494-1554), was the daughter and sole heir of Jean de Polignac (c. 1445-1500), and the widow of Charles de Bueil, comte de Sancerre (before 1497-1515). She married François II comte de la Rochefoucauld (1494-1533) in 1518, with whom she had seven children. Six years after the death of her second husband she had the honour of welcoming the Princes of France and the Habsburg Emperor Charles V (1500-1558) to the Chateau de Verteuil, a secondary family residency in what is now Nouvelle-Aquitaine. Charles said that he had ‘never entered a house whose great virtue, honesty and nobility was felt so keenly’ (Le Père Anselme, Histoire généalogique et chronologique de la Maison Royale de France, des pairs …, 4th edition, 1867, p. 426).
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