Head Study of a Saint (Saint George?)

This upturned head has carried three names. A 19th-century sale catalogue, a scrap of which is still stuck to the back of the panel, called him Saint George looking up at the cross. The Paris doctor Louis La Caze, who left the picture to the Louvre in 1869, thought it a very fine Saint John. The museum now calls it a study head of a saint, perhaps Saint George. Rubens kept heads like this in his studio and reused them in large altarpieces, and this upturned face returns in several of his religious pictures of around 1616 to 1620, among them a painting now in Lyon. Whose hand made this panel is less certain. It was once given to the young van Dyck, and the Louvre now labels it after Rubens, adding that its fine, quick handling could even point to an 18th-century copy made in homage.