Marten Ryckaert

Around 1630 Anthony van Dyck, the great Flemish portraitist, painted his friend Marten Ryckaert seated in a chair in red robes and a fur-trimmed coat, looking every bit a king. The costume was a compliment among fellow painters. What van Dyck did not hide was that Ryckaert had only one arm. The empty left side is shown plainly rather than tucked away.

Ryckaert was a landscape specialist in Antwerp, baptised there in 1587. When he rejoined the city's Guild of Saint Luke, the painters' guild, in 1611, the register listed him simply as the painter with one arm. He is thought to have travelled to Italy as a young man, and his pictures are mostly small, invented scenes in an Italianate manner, rocky valleys and waterfalls under a warm southern light.

He never married, and filled his house on the Meyerstraat with paintings by other artists of his day. Ryckaert died in Antwerp in 1631, in his early forties. Van Dyck's portrait of him later joined the printed series of famous contemporaries known as the Iconography.