Charity

Van Dyck came home to Antwerp in 1627 after about six years in Italy, and this panel shows what he brought back with him. The subject is Charity, one of the three Christian virtues alongside Faith and Hope, shown as a mother with infants. Painters usually had her nursing one of them. Here the three boys clamber over her instead, and she looks upward, towards heaven, where her strength is meant to come from. Her cloak is ultramarine, the blue traditionally given to the Virgin Mary, set against a white dress and a heavy red drapery, colour he had studied in the paintings of Titian. Unusually for van Dyck, who mostly worked on canvas, the support is oak. The wood let him blend the paint so smoothly that the brushstrokes almost disappear, and the National Gallery compares the surface to enamel.