In fresh splendor - Doña Ana de Velasco y Téllez-Girón, Duchess of Bragança, by Juan Pantoja de La Cruz, 1603

 

Ana de Velasco y Téllez-Girón, Duchess consort of Bragança (12 March 1585, Naples – 7 November 1607, Vila Viçosa, Portugal), Spanish noblewoman and mother of João IV of Portugal, the first Portuguese king of the Braganza Dynasty. 

She was the eldest daughter of Juan Fernández de Velasco y Tovar, 5th Duke of Frías, and his cousin and first wife María Tellez-Girón y Guzmán, the daughter of Pedro Téllez-Girón y de la Cueva, 1st Duke of Osuna. She was born in Naples, as her parents had accompanied her mother's father, the Duke of Osuna, when he'd been appointed Viceroy of Naples three years earlier. 

At the age of eighteen she married Teodósio II, Duke of Braganza; he was thirty-five. She gave birth to four children in four years, three of whom - including the future King João IV - lived to adulthood. But she died after giving birth to the fourth at the age of only twenty-two.

The king's pretty box - the "coffret des pierreries" of Louis XIV

 

Jewel box of Louis XIV - previously known as "d'Anne d'Autriche” - created by the goldsmiths Jakob Blanck and Jean Pitan, 1675-76. Remarkably never having been sold, through the subsequent reigns of kings and emperors, through revolutions, the box now resides in the collection of the Musée du Louvre.

This jewel box was naïvely presumed, because of its rather feminine floral decoration, to have been the property of the king's mother, Anne of Austria - her name still clings to it - or that of his wife, Queen Marie-Thérèse/María Teresa, Infanta of Spain and Portugal. But scholarship has now credited it to the king's own collection. The chest was likely used as a store for diamond buttons, hat clips, shoe buckles, epaulettes, and the like, intended to adorn his court costumes.

The box consists of a rectangular wooden base covered with blue silk satin. It is lavishly embellished, over its entire surface, by five plates of gold openwork comprised of foliate and floral motifs; the realistic treatment of the motifs allows the viewer to clearly distinguish precise representations of anemones, tulips, buttercups, daffodils, etc. The gold decoration was created using the lost-wax casting technique, then reworked, chiseled, burnished or matted, and includes some additions of filigree. 

Chevy show-off - one car, one young man, three vintage photographs, circa 1960s

 

JC on the cover - Joan Crawford and the movie magazine (plus one)

 

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And Miss Crawford looking very chic on the March 12, 1940 cover of Look. The aquamarine and diamond jewels were her own.