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One of Van Dyck’s earliest known works, as well as his first known self-portrait, this painting is dated, on the basis of his appearance, to the first half of the 1610s, when he was about fifteen. The thick application of the paint is different from that of the other early self-portraits. Despite the bold execution, the artist probably considered the painting a finished work. Within decades of his death, it was acquired for the celebrated Viennese collection of the second Prince of Liechtenstein.

Although Van Dyck seems to have based the features of the young man on his own, this oil sketch is probably not a self-portrait but rather a tronie (head study) the artist could reuse in his history paintings. Figures with similar heads can be found in several compositions by the young Van Dyck. This sketch was enlarged by a later hand to give it a more finished — and salable — appearance. Oil sketches such as this are regularly recorded in seventeenth-century Flemish collections and attest to the early appreciation of even the more roughly executed examples of Van Dyck’s talent.

This study corresponds closely to the portrait of a merchant in Antwerp traditionally identified as a member of the Vincque family. The somewhat coarse style indicates that the drawing — and thus the painting — must predate Van Dyck’s more refined study of a Jesuit missionary, made in January of 1617. It is therefore probably Van Dyck’s earliest preserved drawing and as such suggests that he had a flourishing practice as a painter well before becoming a master in 1618. The full-length format of the picture attests to the family’s social ambitions and their faith in the capacities of the young artist.

This magnificent drawing represents Nicolas Trigault, a Flemish Jesuit missionary to China. Rubens, who had close ties to the Jesuits in Antwerp, dated the drawing in January 1617, when Trigault visited the city to raise funds and recruit new missionaries. His costume combines a Korean cap and the robe of a Chinese scholar, conveying the Jesuits’ desire to assimilate into Chinese culture while keeping a certain distance from it. Rubens beautifully captured the cut, texture, and weight of the robe and recorded the sensitive features of the priest. Although the drawing was formerly attributed to Van Dyck, its technique, style, and finish point firmly to Rubens, whose handwriting can be recognized in the Latin inscription describing the missionary’s costume at upper right.

Frans Snyders was celebrated for his paintings of animals and still lifes and counted the king of Spain among his clients. At the end of the 1610s, Van Dyck collaborated with Snyders on several paintings, and these joint projects may have led him to sit for this portrait by Van Dyck, who was approximately twenty years old at the time. A likely occasion for the commission of this and the depiction of Snyders’s wife, Margareta de Vos, was the couple’s purchase of a large house on Antwerp’s most prestigious street, which still survives today. The architectural setting of a terrace overlooking parkland evokes the sitters’ status as wealthy patricians, while locating the portraits in a single space.

Van Dyck produced a number of self-portraits around 1621 that show a marked development in mood, style, and purpose from his earlier self-portraits. While his previous self-portraits are intimate in character, these later works demonstrate the considerable status the young artist had by then achieved. They illustrate to perfection Giovan Pietro Bellori’s description of Van Dyck as appearing "resplendent in rich attire of suits and court dress," and "by nature grand and eager to become famous." This painting may have been made in England during Van Dyck’s short stay in the winter of 1620 and attests to his transformation into a sophisticated courtier.

The most impressive of the few extant drawings for portraits from Van Dyck’s Italian period, this has traditionally been considered a study for the portrait of Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio, also in this exhibition. Despite differences in the pose, the thin face with mustache, goatee, and deep-set eyes and the spiky hem of the lace rocchetto help support this identification. The drawing’s size and use of black chalk underdrawing with bold brushwork set it apart from nearly every other portrait drawing by Van Dyck. It could have served to work out the composition, as well as to show his patron the artist’s intentions for the final result.

While Van Dyck may already have met the diplomat and artistic agent George Gage in Rubens’s Antwerp studio, the style and setting of the portrait he made of him indicate it was painted in Rome, where Van Dyck and Gage may have befriended each other. Against a dark landscape, two men present a marble sculpture to the Englishman, whose nonchalant pose evokes his worldliness. Gage was indeed involved in the procurement of ancient statuary for English patrons. The informality of the portrait — evident in the composition, as well as in the varying degrees of finish — contrasts with most of Van Dyck’s Italian portraits, including those of Guido Bentivoglio and the Genoese lady displayed in this gallery.

Throughout his career, Van Dyck used pen to record initial ideas for portraits, but judging from the rare extant examples, these studies increasingly lost the level of detail of the earlier sheets. Instead, they adopt the more modest appearance exemplified by this sketch. The format indicates a woman of aristocratic or high ecclesiastical standing, possibly Archduchess Isabella Clara Eugenia, daughter of King Philip II of Spain and (with her husband) regent of the Southern Netherlands during the early decades of the century. On becoming a widow in 1621, she joined the order of the Poor Clares, and Van Dyck depicted her (albeit not from life) in her nun’s habit in a full-length portrait of 1628 (Galleria Sabauda, Turin).

According to an early source, Nicholas Lanier claimed to have sat for seven full days for his portrait. In this preparatory drawing, Van Dyck swiftly laid out the fall of fabric in Lanier’s cloak, the play of his curls, his elegant hands, and his almost supercilious expression. Nonetheless, the artist made a number of changes in the final composition. For example, instead of displaying a glove in his right hand, Lanier holds his arm akimbo with the hand tucked invisibly at his side. Less obviously, Van Dyck removed a curling lock of hair to leave Lanier’s temple exposed.

This drawing prepared one of a pair of portraits of the Antwerp painter Theodoor Rombouts and his wife Anna van Thielen, who posed with their daughter, Anna Maria. The sitters belonged to the circle of Van Dyck’s colleagues and friends in Antwerp. Anna’s brother was a successful flower painter, as was her niece. The knee-length format is reminiscent of the traditional sixteenth-century portrait type that had remained popular in Antwerp. Anna’s expression, with its lifted eyebrow, makes for a forthright and engaging likeness.

Van Dyck’s sitters are famous for their elegant, slender hands, yet he very rarely made studies of them. One exception is this drawing. It has long been described as preparatory to a painting of an unidentified sitter in Munich, but a comparison suggests that Van Dyck saw portrait drawings as general guides rather than models to be precisely followed. The drawing has a nearly complete history of ownership in the collections of nine painters.

Cesare Alessandro Scaglia, the scion of a noble Piedmontese family, was made an abbot as a child but devoted his life to a diplomatic career that took him to courts across Europe. He spent his last years as an exile in Flanders, where he commissioned many portraits and devotional works from Van Dyck. This image of the abbot adoring the Virgin and Child is remarkable for the portrait-like depiction of the Virgin, who bears a striking resemblance to Marie-Claire de Croÿ, as depicted in a portrait also in this exhibition. Unfortunately, no documentation has yet explained a connection between the duchess and Scaglia. A preparatory study for this painting is displayed here.

Briefly returning to the Southern Netherlands in 1634, Van Dyck busied himself with portraits of Brussels courtiers. These included two portraits of Johann VIII, Count of Nassau-Siegen, a territory of the Holy Roman Empire. The count was a Catholic convert who served as a general for the Hapsburgs in the Southern Netherlands, at war with his own Protestant family. In the portrait that this sketch prepares, Johann appears as a military commander, wearing armor that is the focus of Van Dyck’s sketch, its sheen skillfully evoked by a few highlights in white chalk.

In addition to a portrait of the count in armor, Van Dyck also painted a monumental group portrait of Johann of Nassau-Siegen with his family. The couple appear seated on a dais, flanked by four of their children. As in most of his portrait drawings, Van Dyck focused on the pose and costume of his sitter, barely indicating the face. In the finished painting, Van Dyck altered Johann’s left hand, so that the count seems to be pointing at his son and heir, Johann Franz Desideratus.

This sketch depicts the little-known painter Quintijn Simons, whom Van Dyck portrayed in a painting. In the inscription of a print after this picture, he is described as a "Brussels history painter," but this claim cannot be substantiated by any surviving work. As with many other such sketches, Van Dyck drew on both sides of this sheet. 

A group of five head studies in oil on canvas survive for a now destroyed group portrait of Brussels magistrates, some of which can be related to figures in the composition sketch. This study, for instance, may represent the second man from the left in the sketch. The number of sitters and the large scale of the final painting must have made it hard to paint directly from life on the canvas, as was Van Dyck’s probable method when working on smaller portraits.

A masterpiece of seventeenth-century printmaking, Van Dyck’s etched self-portrait is as remarkable for its technique as for its unfinished appearance. The painter’s handsome features float at the top of a sheet that is otherwise empty, save for the light scratches in the copper plate from which it was pulled. The state would not have been considered final by any standard of the time, but it is clear from the surviving impressions that it was marketed and appreciated as an exceptional work of art. The plate was later finished with a burin to serve as the frontispiece of the earliest known edition of the Iconographie.

For the earliest known edition of the Iconographie, published by Gillis Hendricx in 1645, Van Dyck’s unfinished etched self-portrait was made into a frontispiece by the engraver Jacob Neefs, the head transformed into a marble bust placed on a pedestal and inscribed with the edition’s title ("One Hundred Images of Princes, Scholars, Painters," etc.). The copy shown here is one of the few preserved in a seventeenth-century binding. The painted portrait that Van Dyck originally intended to make into a print was later engraved by Lucas Vorsterman. In it, the artist wears a gold chain that may be the one awarded to him by Charles I in 1633.

The son and namesake of the greatest Netherlandish painter of the sixteenth century, Pieter Brueghel the Younger devoted his career to producing a vast number of copies and variations of his father’s work. Van Dyck made two drawings of Brueghel to prepare a print for the Iconographie series. In the drawing shown here, Brueghel appears in three-quarter profile, turned away from the viewer, clasping his cloak to his chest. The final print, based on a drawing now in Saint Petersburg (State Hermitage Museum), brings Brueghel’s hands closer together and positions him frontally, directing his gaze outward. Van Dyck adopted this latter pose for an etching, which he executed himself and endowed with the swift quality of a pen sketch.

The work of the painter Adriaen Brouwer, whose subjects were often drawn from low-life and taverns, was sought after by the most discerning collectors of his time, including Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt. Van Dyck’s grisaille was probably made in 1634, when Brouwer was living with Van Dyck’s frequent collaborator, the printmaker Paulus Pontius. It served as the model for an engraving by Schelte Adamsz. Bolswert.

The painter Gaspar de Crayer dominated the market for altarpieces in seventeenth-century Brussels. Van Dyck’s drawing is highly finished, but for his engraving, Paulus Pontius worked instead from an intermediary grisaille, the tonal richness of which could communicate Van Dyck’s intentions better than a chalk drawing. De Crayer holds a portfolio in the drawing, which Pontius reworked as part of the cape slung over the sitter’s right shoulder. It is not clear if Van Dyck intended the portfolio to melt away into De Crayer’s robes in the sketch or if Pontius simply misread the dark lower part of the grisaille. The portfolio, a reference to De Crayer’s art, may have seemed too vulgar an attribute for a socially ambitious artist whose career progressed from a seat on the Brussels council in 1627 to an appointment at the archducal court in 1635.

Van Dyck’s Iconographie series of prints includes three Spanish generals whose military careers brought them to Flanders, among them, Manuel Frockas, Count of Feria. Simplicity of composition and relatively cursory execution distinguish these generals’ portrait drawings, likely all made from life in 1631–32. While the drawings appear to depict the sitters in civilian dress, the later oil sketches and engravings show them in full armor, each holding a commander’s baton. Like the hands that enliven the compositions, these features were probably all added from memory or invented by the artist.

Better known by his Latinized name Gevartius, Gaspar Gevaerts was a preeminent philologist and historian, serving as secretary of Antwerp for four decades. In the drawing, preparatory to an engraving by Paulus Pontius for the series known as the Iconographie, Van Dyck alludes to Gevaerts’s scholarly endeavors with a single book. He renders the face in exquisite focus while rapidly sketching elements of dress and pose with thicker lines. Although the drawing is incised for transfer to the engraver’s plate, Pontius worked from Van Dyck’s later oil sketch for Gevaerts’s final pose and costume. In the oil sketch, Van Dyck trimmed the sitter’s collar with lace and added a fur-lined cape, slung partly over the left arm. The modification lends Gevaerts’s slender figure a more robust aspect; the cape also refers to his public office.

Inigo Jones worked as a theatrical designer throughout the reigns of James I and Charles I while also assuming the role of Surveyor of the King’s Works in 1615. The projects he carried out while in this capacity, including the Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace and the piazza at Covent Garden, furthered Jones’s introduction of a Palladian classicism to English architecture. In this drawing, likely not made from life but based by Van Dyck on an earlier portrait, Jones appears behind a parapet, holding a sheet of paper in an allusion to his gifts as a draftsman. The drawing is squared for transfer, and the engraver Robert van Voerst followed it closely in his print for the series known as the Iconographie.

The painter Joos de Momper specialized in mountainous landscapes. In the portrait at right, Van Dyck’s etching technique — consisting of stippling, lines alternatingly scratchy or fluent, and areas of dense hatching — conveys the varied textures of the wrinkled skin, curly hair, leather glove, and rugged landscape. Probably to preserve Van Dyck’s original, the plate was not finished with the burin in later states, but a completely new print was made by the engraver Lucas Vorsterman. The state shown here of this second plate bears the address of Martinus van den Eynden, the first recorded publisher of the Iconographie.

Paulus Pontius was a prolific engraver whose collaboration with Peter Paul Rubens, Van Dyck, and other artists resulted in some of the best engravings published in seventeenth-century Flanders. He contributed more plates to Van Dyck’s Iconographie than any other printmaker. Probably made a few years after an earlier portrait, of which a largely etched state is also on view in this gallery, this completely engraved print differs not only in the more established appearance of the sitter but also in the smooth finish. Through hatching and crosshatching, Pontius, who engraved the print himself, created the gradations in tone so valued in engravings at the time, most subtly in his face and hand.

This drawing, almost certainly made from life, provided the prototype for Van Dyck’s grisaille of Nicolaas Rockox, the Antwerp mayor who was an important patron of the artist. It accords with one characteristic type of portrait sketch in Van Dyck’s oeuvre: entirely in black chalk, with a detailed rendering of physiognomy and rougher indications of dress and attributes. Rockox’s left hand rests on a large sculpted head, probably representing Minerva, goddess of wisdom. With his right hand, he points straight at her forehead. This attribute was later eliminated from the painted and engraved versions of Van Dyck’s portrait. The drawing was perhaps intended as a prototype for a never executed print in the Iconographie series.

Unlike the other grisailles shown here, Van Dyck’s portrait of Nicolaas Rockox, a towering figure in the political and cultural life of Antwerp, has an unusual round format. It was likely painted for Rockox’s own collection and reflected his interest in ancient coins. Paulus Pontius’s engraving meanwhile embellishes the portrait with an architectural framework and Latin verses by Gaspar Gevaerts that praise Rockox for his unwavering service and indifference to power. These features depart from the Iconographie series and indicate that the engraving was intended to circulate independently.

This depiction of Hendrick van Steenwijck the Younger, a painter of imaginary architectural views, is one of Van Dyck’s most accomplished portrait drawings. Deep shadows enhance the sitter’s strong features, long curls and facial hair, the nervous line of the lace ruffs around his wrists, and the strong gestures of his hands. Although blank, both in the drawing and in Paulus Pontius’s faithful engraving after it, the sheet of paper must refer to Van Steenwijck’s mastery as a perspectival draftsman. A fellow native of Antwerp, Van Steenwijck probably sat for Van Dyck in London, where the former had been based since 1615.

Van Dyck’s brooding portrait of the engraver Lucas Vorsterman has colored the latter’s reputation, along with anecdotal evidence for his instability, aggression, and hostile relationship with Peter Paul Rubens. Van Dyck knew Vorsterman well from the period when both were working under Rubens’s supervision, and he may have learned how to etch from him. In his autograph print, Van Dyck amplified the nervous energy of his chalk drawing. A second portrait of Vorsterman engraved after Van Dyck is on view in the Cabinet.

Mainly known for his small landscape paintings and drawings featuring battles and robberies, Sebastiaan Vrancx was also a book illustrator, poet, playwright, and member of Antwerp’s militia. Van Dyck’s drawing of Vrancx appears to have been made from life: apart from his face and right sleeve, the draftsmanship is not very detailed. In a gesture toward Vrancx’s military duties, his right hand emphasizes his sword, of which only the summarily indicated hilt is visible. The drawing probably did not serve as the direct model for the printmaker, whose plate would have required the more detailed guidance of an oil sketch.

Van Dyck must have met the distinguished lawyer and philologist Jan van den Wouwer in Peter Paul Rubens’s circle and may have portrayed him before leaving for Italy in 1621. A later painting (Pushkin Museum, Moscow), in which Van den Wouwer wears a cloak trimmed with leopard skin and a golden chain, was the basis for this print. Its first, purely etched state is believed to be by Van Dyck. In the second state, shown here, an engraver, possibly Lucas Vorsterman, modeled the face more thoroughly with fine burin lines, refining the print with a wonderful luster.

Michiel le Blon’s combined careers as a diplomat and art dealer brought him to the Netherlands, Flanders, Italy, England, and Sweden. Among other transactions, he was involved in major sales from the collections of Peter Paul Rubens and (after his death) Van Dyck. Probably commissioned by Le Blon himself, perhaps as a kind of calling card, this portrait was made by the outstanding Dutch engraver Theodor Matham after a painting by Van Dyck from around 1630. The calligraphic French inscription describes Le Blon as "agent of the Queen and Crown of Sweden."

This double portrait represents a key moment in Van Dyck’s English career. The commission had initially been given to the Dutchman Daniel Mytens, the leading court artist before Van Dyck’s arrival in England, but his painting must not have satisfied his patron, for it was eventually replaced by Van Dyck’s new version. Van Dyck deviates remarkably little from Mytens’s model while improving every aspect of it: the liveliness of the painting, the interaction — at once tender and formal — between the royal pair and between the queen and the viewer, the added interest of the background, and the magnificent harmony of colors. In the year of this triumph, Van Dyck was knighted and appointed "principalle Paynter" of the king while Mytens left England and returned to his native Holland.

In preparing his portrait of Henrietta Maria, Van Dyck drew this study of her costume. The absence of any close study of the queen’s facial features suggests the drawing may have been made from a hired model wearing a garment lent to the studio. The use of colored chalks to record certain details of the queen’s dress is almost unique in Van Dyck’s drawn oeuvre. Entirely focused on the fall of fabric and the brilliant highlights in the riding clothes, the drawing gives only the most summary indication of the queen’s surroundings or her attendant.

This is one of the very few surviving oil sketches by Van Dyck for which the related finished portrait still survives. Each of the heads in the complete portrait — representing the five eldest children of King Charles I — must have been based on a similar sketch done from life, whereas the overall composition and individual poses would have been prepared with chalk on paper or in oil on panel. The number of heads in the painting, as well as the challenge of having young children sit still, probably led Van Dyck to make the head studies separately. With admirable economy, he made sure that the sketch contained sufficient information regarding the children’s physiognomy, in the process creating a masterpiece of rapid observation.

A prominent courtier and friend of Van Dyck’s, Endymion Porter is depicted with his youngest son, Philip, who was about five when this masterful study was made. The drawing corresponds to the left part of a family portrait of Porter and his wife and was probably made from life to capture the interaction between the figures and the complexities of their costume. The fingers of Porter’s hand resting on the pommel of a sword are drawn twice at right. A second drawing of young Philip, which may have preceded the present sheet, is displayed here.

Displayed here on its side, this is Van Dyck’s detailed study for the costume and hands holding gloves of George Porter, the eldest son of the courtier Endymion Porter and the second figure from the right in Van Dyck’s portrait of the Porter family. The drawing does not include George’s head, which Van Dyck must have studied separately, either in chalk or (more likely) in an oil sketch. The recto of this sheet contains two studies of George’s youngest brother for the same composition.

A leading aristocrat and art patron in Caroline England, Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, was portrayed several times by Van Dyck, as well as by Peter Paul Rubens. Representing his formidable presence with exceptional immediacy, this drawing does not correspond directly to any of Van Dyck’s portraits of the "Collector Earl" but was undoubtedly made from life with a larger composition in mind. The drawing may be a rejected idea for a lost painting that showed a seated Arundel with his wife, Aletheia Talbot, and their family.

A prominent nobleman under Charles I, James Stuart is seen in this drawing and the related painting wearing the attire and insignia of the Order of the Garter, with which he had been invested in 1633. Although the costume and face are specific enough to suggest that the drawing was made with Stuart himself sitting, it mainly served as a study of his pose and costume. For the head, Van Dyck would probably have made a more detailed oil sketch, possibly on the canvas intended for the finished painting.

This fairly detailed head study stands apart from most of Van Dyck’s English-period portrait drawings, which are generally concerned only with pose and costume. The long-haired youth wearing a luxurious lace collar may be Bernard Stuart, brother of James, Duke of Lennox and Richmond, who is shown in the portrait study here. Van Dyck portrayed Bernard together with another brother, John, in a famous double portrait from around 1638 (The National Gallery, London), and the young nobleman is also possibly the subject of the drawing here.

This head study, until recently attributed to Peter Lely, is one of the more detailed portrait drawings of Van Dyck’s English period. The lady’s pointed nose and chin and curly hair are precisely recorded, while her dress is indicated only with the faintest outlines. Despite its small size, the drawing makes the somewhat forbidding appearance of the woman remarkably present.

James Stanley, Lord Strange, Earl of Derby, was descended from an ancient land-owning family in the north of England that also ruled the Isle of Man. He married Charlotte de La Trémoille, who was related to some of the most prominent aristocratic defenders of Protestantism in continental Europe. Both played a role in the royalist cause following the outbreak of the civil war, and the earl was eventually beheaded. Here, Lord and Lady Strange form an inverted triangle with one of their daughters, an arrangement of classical simplicity that coexists with an allusive iconographic program. The island in the background may represent the Isle of Man and the color of the young girl’s dress her descent from the House of Orange.

Pomponne II de Bellièvre, Lord of Grignon, came from a prominent family of French statesmen and twice served as French ambassador to the English court. Van Dyck most likely painted Bellièvre during the latter’s first posting to London, although the ambassador could also have sat for him during the painter’s sojourn in Paris shortly before his death. Van Dyck’s likeness is a study in muted elegance, with Bellièvre’s long brown hair lapping over his floppy collar while a sash of crimson silk accents his otherwise black and white costume. Bellièvre was a noted collector of works by Nicolas Poussin and Philippe de Champaigne, and his austere and learned taste may have informed his instructions to Van Dyck for the present portrait.

This outstanding portrait offers valuable evidence of Van Dyck’s method during his English period. The treatment of the face is highly finished and refined, but the woman’s bust and hand await finishing glazes, and there are extensive areas of unpainted canvas that suggest a shawl wrapped around her body. As with many other works from his London studio, Van Dyck must have painted his sitter’s face from life, resulting in a halo still visible around her head. A workshop assistant would probably have completed the painting of the background and draperies before Van Dyck applied a few final touches. If the occasional identification of the sitter as Rachel, Countess of Southampton, is correct, then work on the portrait may have been interrupted by the sitter’s death in childbirth.

There is almost no surviving documentation for the life of Van Dyck’s mistress, Margaret Lemon, although some sources describe her as a famous courtesan. In this portrait, long considered lost, Lemon appears in three-quarter profile, delicately touching the fabric at her shoulder. Only recently has this version been recognized as Van Dyck’s original, the source of many imitations. At some point, the canvas was cut down, truncating the gesture of Lemon’s left hand. This area may have been unfinished at Van Dyck’s death.

Mary Ruthven came from an aristocratic, if impoverished, family of Scottish Catholics and served as a maid of honor to Queen Henrietta Maria. Van Dyck’s marriage to her in early 1640 marked his social ascent, but the painter died less than two years later, just eight days after the birth of his daughter Justina. Van Dyck’s portrait of his new bride is a sensuously painted autograph work. A cluster of oak leaves bound in Lady van Dyck’s hair may symbolize constancy, while her elegantly splayed fingers call attention to the proscribed Catholic faith that she shared with her husband, symbolized in the crucifix she displays.

With its vivid color scheme and fluid brushwork, this portrait has long been seen as an exception within the work of Van Dyck’s last period. The print publisher and art dealer François Langlois, a key figure in the world of European publishing, is most likely depicted here at the very end of Van Dyck’s life, when the two men were both in Paris. Van Dyck’s unusual composition, which may reflect a friendship between sitter and painter, shows Langlois playing a musette, a kind of bagpipe on which he is reputed to have been a virtuoso.

The cartouche of the blue mount made for the drawing by the eighteenth-century French collector Pierre-Jean Mariette attributes the sheet to Van Dyck. The focus on the pose and costume of the lady, rather than on her face, is indeed comparable to many of Van Dyck’s surviving chalk studies for portraits from the 1630s. However, the more regular, controlled style points to Van Dyck’s great contemporary Jacob Jordaens, who made the drawing in preparation for a painted portrait of the wife of a wealthy Antwerp merchant.

This detailed drawing is the most impressive of three studies of armor, all by the same hand and previously thought to be by Van Dyck. Although he regularly represented his military sitters dressed for battle, no related studies of armor by Van Dyck have survived. The rich technique, including colored gouache, distinguishes this drawing from Van Dyck’s portrait studies. Still, it can be situated in the artist’s larger circle, as it once belonged to Prosper Henry Lankrink, an assistant to the portraitist Peter Lely, who was also one of the most important early collectors of drawings by Van Dyck.

Although hands play a major part in enlivening and conveying expression in Van Dyck’s portraits, very few of his hand studies survive. This sheet is among a group of carefully worked-out drawings that were formerly thought to be by him but have now been reattributed to Cornelis Jonson van Ceulen, a Dutch portraitist who had a successful career in London until he was overshadowed in the 1630s by Van Dyck’s arrival. This drawing dates from after his return to Holland in 1643 and is preparatory to a painting of a member of the Raphoen family in Amsterdam, as the artist’s inscription in Dutch ("Miss Raphune") indicates.