famous painting

famous painting
The balcony on which the girls were seated opened out of a room richly hung with tawny-coloured Flanders leather stamped with gold foliage. The beams that ran in parallel lines across the ceiling charmed the eye by their thousand fantastic carvings, painted and gilt. Gorgeous enamels gleamed here and there from the doors of inlaid cabinets; a wild boar’s head in faience crowned a magnificent side-board, the two steps of which proclaimed the mistress of the house to be the wife or widow of a knight banneret. At the further end of the room, in a rich red velvet chair, beside a lofty chimney-piece, blazoned from top to bottom with coats of arms, sat Mme. de Gondelaurier, whose five-and-fifty years were no less distinctly written on her dress than on her face.
Beside her stood a young man whose native air of breeding was somewhat heavily tinged with vanity and bravado—one of those handsome