Portrait of a Gentleman with his Son

The small figure in a long dark gown looking up at this man is his son. In Antwerp around 1628, when van Dyck painted them, little boys wore skirts like their sisters until they were several years old. Charles Le Brun, Louis XIV's first painter, listed the child as a boy in 1683, and a 19th-century catalogue later took him for a girl. The canvas is more than two metres tall, one half of a matching pair. Its companion shows the wife seated with their daughter, and together the two pictures bend a rule. Custom gave the husband the side of honour, on the viewer's left, with his wife turned towards him from the right. Van Dyck swapped the places. The husband stands on the right, and he seems to be stepping forward while she stays in her chair.