Philip, Lord Wharton

In 1632 Anthony van Dyck arrived in London, entered the service of Charles I, and was knighted within months. He would spend most of the rest of his life giving the Stuart court the polished, silvery look we still picture today. This portrait dates from that very first year. The sitter is Philip Wharton, then about 19 and newly the fourth Baron Wharton, and he holds a small distinction: he was the first Englishman other than the king to commission a portrait from the newly arrived painter. Van Dyck dressed the teenage baron as a shepherd, in a plum-colored coat and a butter-yellow cloak, a curved shepherd's staff in the crook of his arm, standing before a craggy landscape. A line of yellow lettering in the corner records him at 'about ye age of 19.' Wharton went on to become a committed Puritan and, in the civil war that followed, a commander for Parliament, and he kept adding to a whole gallery of Van Dyck portraits at his country house.