Attributed to Gabriel Metsu (1629–67). The mystery of this picture’s subject is compounded by its unusual physical make-up. A black woman dressed in luxurious 17th-century Dutch fashions appears in an arched window decorated with a stone frieze of putti carousing with a goat. It is unclear how this Bacchic subject, redolent of drunken revelry, relates to the figure, although it may be intended as an innuendo on the respectability of her profession or character. The woman is painted on a canvas that was subsequently attached to the wooden panel onto which the stone surround was painted. This may have been a patched-up solution by a later hand, designed to rescue a fragment of a damaged canvas. However, Dutch artists of this era are known to have extended and adapted their works in this way as their ideas developed. (https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/documents/the-pictures-at-polesden-lacey.pdf)