Marie Anne Schotten

In 1763 a guide to the paintings in the churches of the Austrian Netherlands described this portrait hanging in Brussels, in the church of Saint Michael and Saint Gudula, above the epitaph of the Schotte family. The guide called it a van Dyck. Marie Anne Schotten had died in 1628, and her husband, Charles Schotte, put up a marble monument to her there. She stands at full length, on a canvas more than 1.8 metres tall. The portrait was still in the church in 1792. In 1794 French revolutionary armies occupied Brussels, and it seems to have left the building around then. A century later a London dealer lent it to the van Dyck exhibition held in Antwerp in 1899 for the 300th anniversary of his birth, and in 1903 the Museum of Fine Arts bought it, still as a van Dyck, for 26,000 dollars. Since the 1940s scholars have proposed another name, Cornelis de Vos, an older Antwerp contemporary of van Dyck, and the museum now catalogues it under de Vos while noting that opinions still vary.