Portrait of a Man

Van Dyck returned from Italy to Antwerp in 1627 and worked there until 1632, in a city the Dutch had cut off from the sea by closing the river Scheldt. This portrait belongs to those years. The man stands in slashed black silk with a lace collar, the cloak over one shoulder, one hand at his waist and the other turned in the sharp foreshortening van Dyck reached for again and again in that period. By 1745 the canvas was in the Spanish royal collection, at a country house of Philip V outside Madrid. The sitter was long identified as Paulus Pontius, the Antwerp engraver who cut many of van Dyck's designs into copper, on nothing more than a facial resemblance. The Prado no longer trusts that identification, and the reason is at his hip. A sword was the attribute of a nobleman, and an engraver had no claim to one.