Portrait of a Judge

Édouard André bought this portrait out of the Rothan collection as a Jordaens, after another Antwerp painter of van Dyck's own generation. It was then called a Rubens. The attribution that stuck came from the director of the Berlin museums, who published it as van Dyck, and no one has argued with him since. The sitter has been harder to fix. The museum calls him a judge, though when the painting went into a large Paris exhibition on the century of Rubens in 1977 it was shown simply as an old man, since nobody could say what rank his clothes announced. That black is plain Flemish dress of the kind Antwerp had been painting for decades. Behind him the column on its pedestal and the red hanging come out of Venetian portraiture, which is one reason the picture is not thought to be early work.