Peeter Symons

At the sitter's right side the shape of an outstretched arm shows through the dark paint. Van Dyck first posed Peeter Symons with that arm thrown out, then thought better of it and painted it over. The museum treats that change of plan as the evidence that this canvas is his own. A studio assistant or a copyist repeating a settled design would have had no reason to make it.

Van Dyck painted the portrait in Antwerp around 1630 to 1632, a few years after coming home from Italy in 1627. The man's name comes from a print. Late in the 17th century the engraver Jacobus de Man published his likeness with the line Petrus Symen pictor Antverpiensis, Peter Symons, painter of Antwerp. Symons had been received as a master in the city's painters' guild in 1629 or 1630, so when he sat for van Dyck he had only lately become a master.

The picture spent most of the 19th century in the Netherlands. Count Frederik Willem van Limburg Stirum probably bought it around 1813 to 1815, and in 1890 his granddaughter sold it to the Boston collector Francis Bartlett, telling him it had been in her family for 70 or 80 years.