Head of a Woman

By 1638 Anthony van Dyck had spent several years in London as principal painter to King Charles I, turning out the elegant court portraits that still fix how we picture that doomed king and his circle. A small head like this belongs to a quieter, older habit he brought from Flanders. Painters of his training kept study heads, faces done quickly from a living model and set aside, ready to be reused for a saint, a mourner or an onlooker in some larger religious or mythological picture. That is why she is no one in particular and needs no setting: the interest is entirely in the turn of the head and the fall of light across the face. Van Dyck was working at enormous speed in these London years, and he had few left, dying in 1641 at just 42.