Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, portrait as a widow

In 1627 Isabella Clara Eugenia had been a widow for six years. Her husband, Archduke Albert, with whom she had ruled the Southern Netherlands from Brussels, died in 1621, the same year the truce with the Dutch ran out and the war started again. From then on she governed for her nephew, King Philip IV of Spain, and she dressed in the habit of the Poor Clares, the Franciscan nuns, which is how she appears here. Van Dyck had just come home to Antwerp after his years in Italy when he painted her, and in 1630 she made him her court painter. The canvas later belonged to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, who governed the same provinces from Brussels in the 1640s and 1650s, and it now hangs at Ambras Castle in Innsbruck.