Not exactly becoming to the standards of the modern observer, nor fitting the canon of any "girl next door"- real or imagined - Quentin Metsys' "The ugly old woman"(1513) at the National Gallery in London, has been categorized as a social satire inspired by descriptions of old women by humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam: "…old crones who still wish to play the goat and display their foul and withered breasts…who industriously smear their faces with paint and never get away from the mirror".

In fifteenth-century Northern art, the theme of the "nagging old wife" abounds in several variations, and reliable sources actually ascribe this portrait to a certain "Marguerite the sack-mouthed", daughter of Henry X, duke of Carinthia and Count of Tyrol. She presumably married the duke of Moravia and died in 1369.

However, this is Professor James Snyder's account in "Northern Renaissance Art": "yet it seems impossible that this malformed female head could be seriously considered a portrait…the Burgundian two-horned wimple that she wears was fashionable from 1430 and 1450 and is another indication of the archaizing intention…whatever the explanation is, the face, misshapen and malformed, repulsive yet pathetic, that emerges from the overly ostentatious costume, had a considerable afterlife and is probably best known today in John Tenniel's drawing of the Ugly Duchess for Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland".

Quentin Metsys (1465-1530)
Flemish artist, the first important painter of the Antwerp school. Trained as a blacksmith in his native Leuven, Metsys is said to have studied painting after falling in love with an artist's daughter. In 1491 he went to Antwerp and was admitted into the painters' guild.
Among Metsys' early works are two pictures of the Virgin and Child. His most celebrated paintings are two large triptych altarpieces, The Holy Kinship, (or St Anne Altarpiece) ordered for the St Pieterskerk in Leuven (1507-09), and The Entombment of the Lord (c. 1508-11), both of which exhibit strong religious feeling and precision of detail. His tendency to accentuate individual expression is demonstrated in such pictures as The Old Man and the Courtesan and The Moneylender and His Wife.