Portrait of a Young General

The man in the gilded armour has never been identified. Vienna still catalogues him simply as a young general, and the museum dates the canvas to about 1622 to 1624, when van Dyck was in his twenties and working in Italy, where the grand Venetian manner of portraiture reached him. The armour is chased and gilded for ceremony rather than for fighting, and above it he wears a broad collar of lace.

His owners, by contrast, are known in detail. In 1691 the portrait was in Madrid, in the collection of Juan Gaspar Enriquez de Cabrera, Admiral of Castile, whose inventory at death ran past 1,000 pictures and was reckoned the third largest in Spain after the king's. In 1705 it passed to Archduke Charles, the Habsburg claimant to the Spanish throne, while the war over that throne was still being fought. He became Emperor Charles VI, and by 1720 the painting was recorded in the imperial gallery in Vienna, where it has stayed.