Portrait of a Woman and Child

Around 1620 or 1621, before he set off for Italy, Anthony van Dyck was painting the prosperous families of Antwerp, and here is the wife of one of them with her small son on her lap. The National Gallery does not name either of them. Her clothes say a good deal about her standing: black silk, a stiff gold stomacher over the bodice, lace at the wrist and a bracelet. The great pleated ruff was already old-fashioned in much of Europe, though it held on longer in the Netherlands. The boy wears long skirts, as small children of both sexes did then, and it is his feathered hat that tells you he is a boy. Van Dyck sets his lilac silks against his mother's black, and behind them a crimson curtain opens onto a grey landscape.