Follower of Anthony van Dyck

Around 1770 Thomas Gainsborough painted a London merchant's son in a suit of blue satin cut in the fashion of the 1630s, a costume the 18th century simply called Van Dyck dress. More than a century after van Dyck died in London in 1641, his way of presenting a sitter, the easy pose, the shimmer of silk, the long hands, was still the pattern English portrait painters worked from, and sitters still dressed up to match it.

Follower of Anthony van Dyck is the label for a picture made by someone working in that manner whose own name has been lost. It makes no claim that the painter trained in his studio, and the work may have been made in his lifetime or long after it. Workshop of would place the picture in his rooms, and copy after would tie it to one known original.

Among the paintings under this heading are two portraits in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, of Wolfgang Wilhelm, Count Palatine of Neuburg, and of his first wife, Magdalene of Bavaria, which the Munich catalogue lists with the word Nachfolger, follower. Another is a Portrait of a Man with an Armillary Sphere at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.