Lady with a Fan

Van Dyck had spent about six years in Italy, mostly in Genoa painting its aristocracy, and when he came home to Antwerp in the late 1620s he brought that world back with him. Antwerp portraits had long been sober things, meant to show a sitter's good character through a steady look and quiet hands. Here, around 1628, he gives an unnamed wealthy woman the ease he had learned in the south: the turned pose, the loose fan, the fall of light down the black silk. We don't know her name. Within a few years he would leave for London to become court painter to Charles I, and the grace rehearsed on portraits like this one is what the English king wanted.