Portrait of a Lady with her Daughter

Van Dyck painted this in Antwerp around 1628, as one of a matching pair. The companion canvas is the same height and shows a man standing with his son. Here the mother sits in a red armchair with her daughter beside her in pale satin, against a red curtain and a column, the kind of setting he had worked out a few years earlier for the merchant families of Genoa.

Who they were, nobody can say. In the French king's inventory of 1683, drawn up by the court painter Charles Le Brun, the two canvases are listed as Rubens and his wife, and a later reading turned the man into Rubens's brother. Those names stuck for more than a century. The Louvre, which got the pair when Louis XIV bought the collection of the Paris banker Everhard Jabach in 1671, now records the sitters as unknown. In 1946 the two pictures came back to Paris from separate country houses where they had been hidden during the war, this one from the Château de Sourches.