Abraham and Isaac

The National Gallery in Prague dates this to before 1620, and other catalogues put it around 1617. Van Dyck was a teenager in Antwerp then, and it is among his earliest surviving religious paintings.

The story comes from Genesis. God orders Abraham to take his son Isaac up a mountain and offer him there as a burnt sacrifice, and Abraham tells the boy nothing. The wood for the fire is loaded onto Isaac's back. On the way up the son asks where the lamb is, and the father answers that God will provide one. An angel stops the knife at the last moment, and a ram caught in a thicket is killed instead.

What van Dyck painted is that walk. The boy carries the bundle of firewood on his shoulder, the old man moves behind him with the blade already in his hand. The gallery's full title for the picture is Abraham and Isaac on the Way to the Place of Sacrifice.