Portrait of a Lady

Around 1630 van Dyck was the portrait painter the well-off families of Antwerp wanted, and his studio had to find ways to keep up. The Alte Pinakothek thinks this canvas shows one of them. When the museum X-rayed it, and the man's portrait that is its companion, oval white shapes showed up under both faces. The faces had been left blank at first, the paint laid around them. The museum's reading is that the workshop kept full-length portraits like these largely finished and ready, so that a client who came in on the off chance needed only to have the face painted in. Together with handling weaker than in van Dyck's own portraits, that finding moved the pair from his hand to his workshop. The woman stands in a broad lace collar, and her name is no longer known.