Head Study of a Woman Looking Up

This is a working piece, painted as material for other pictures. Van Dyck painted the young woman's head in oil on paper, quickly and thickly, around 1618 to 1620, and the paper was later mounted on an oak panel. He was barely 20, and studies like this were the stock of a busy Antwerp studio, faces that could be dropped into large compositions as they were needed. This one was used. The same upturned head reappears in his Brazen Serpent, now in the Prado in Madrid, as one of the Israelites struck by snakes in the desert, a woman half unconscious and caught up in the miracle of the cure. The museum notes the thick paint and nervous brushwork typical of his early years. The study later belonged to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm.