Portrait of a Gentleman with a Sword

In April 1794, in the middle of the Terror, this portrait went on show in the Louvre, which had opened as a public museum the summer before. It had been seized by the revolutionary authorities from the widow of Louis, duc de Noailles, a marshal of France. Nobody can say for certain who the sitter is. The art historian Gustav Glück named him as the painter Paul de Vos, from a very similar portrait in Vienna, but most specialists have since rejected that, and it is not even sure the two pictures show the same man. The sword of the title is little more than a hilt, half lost in the dark cloak near his lowered hand. The Louvre dates the canvas to around 1620, reading its quick, colourful brushwork in the Venetian manner as a sign of van Dyck's last Antwerp years before Italy, or his first months there.