Portrait of an old man

When van Dyck painted this elderly man he was barely into his twenties, still working in Antwerp in the shadow of Rubens, whose studio he had recently left to set up on his own. The date sits around 1621, the year he would pack up for Italy to study the Venetian masters. The sitter has no name now. The picture came as one half of a pair, hung beside a portrait of an old woman that van Dyck made as its companion, almost certainly a married couple recording themselves late in life. What the young painter gives them is Rubens's warmth without the grand staging, close and plain, the kind of steady burgher likeness Antwerp wanted before he left for the courts of Italy and, later, England. The Brussels museum received the pair in 1942 as a gift.