Portrait of a Man, possibly Peter van Hecke (1591-1645)

Rubens painted this Antwerp man and his wife as a pair around 1630, both in shiny black with white lace, each set against a red curtain drawn back from a column. He is probably Peter van Hecke, a dealer, and she is probably Clara Fourment. The museum can trace the two panels back only to a Belgian vicomtesse in the 1800s. A Paris gallery sold them to Baron Edmond de Rothschild before 1890, and his family kept them for close to a century at the Château de Pregny outside Geneva. They went to a New York gallery in 1983 and then to London. In 2000 they came to the Mauritshuis on loan, and in 2003 the museum bought them with help from a lottery, the Dutch culture ministry and a long list of art funds.