Portrait of a Gentleman

Nobody knows who this man was. The Alte Pinakothek calls him and the woman in the matching canvas an unknown couple, both painted full length around 1630, each canvas just over two metres tall. For a long time the pair counted as van Dyck's own work, and under his name they came to Munich in 1806 with the paintings of the Düsseldorf gallery. The museum's recent research has changed the label. It now gives both portraits to van Dyck's workshop, the assistants who carried his designs through to finished pictures, and its first reason is quality. Set beside portraits he painted himself, these fall short. The man's canvas hangs in a frame designed by Joseph Effner, architect to the Bavarian court, dated to 1720.