Family Portrait

The Twelve Years' Truce between Spain and the Dutch Republic ran out in April 1621 and the war resumed, which for Antwerp meant the river Scheldt stayed shut and its merchants kept trading through other people's ports. This portrait was painted in that city that year, of a family who dressed expensively and sat without any flattery.

Nobody wrote down who they were. The Hermitage proposes the household of the landscape painter Jan Wildens and keeps the word possibly in front of it. No identification has stuck.

The baby on her mother's lap wears a string of red coral, which small children were given as a charm against illness. The mother's ruff is starched into a rigid wheel. The father's collar and cuffs are fine lace, and van Dyck worked them as carefully as he worked the faces.

The painting reached Russia before 1774, among the pictures Catherine the Great was buying for the Hermitage, and it has stayed there since.