Charity

Charity in 16th-century painting is usually a woman feeding children at the breast. Van Dyck dropped that. In the composition this canvas repeats, worked out soon after he came home to Antwerp in 1627 from some six years in Italy, the woman looks upward and the children simply climb, cling and reach: one leaning over her shoulder, one hauling himself up at her side, one seated on the heavy red drapery with both arms lifted. Her own attention is somewhere above the frame, and none of the three has it. The Prado dates its canvas no more precisely than the 17th century and gives it to van Dyck's workshop. The version in his own hand hangs in London. This one came to the museum in 1889, a gift from the duchess of Pastrana.