Count Hendrik van den Bergh

The man in armour commanded Spain's army in Flanders, and he was Dutch by birth. Hendrik van den Bergh, born in 1573, was the son of a sister of William the Silent, the leader of the Dutch revolt, and he served the Catholic king anyway. He rose under Spinola to the second command in the Netherlands and was leading the army in the field by 1629. Then, after negotiations with the Dutch stadtholder Frederick Henry, he went over to the Republic in 1632. Van Dyck painted him somewhere inside those years, with the armour, the commander's baton and the general's sash running down a foreshortened arm, a rock at his shoulder and the landscape opening behind. Philip IV bought the canvas in London around the middle of the century, at the sale of Charles I's collection. By the following century the Spanish royal inventories had lost the name, and the picture was catalogued for years as the Duke of Alba, who had governed those same provinces for Spain long before.