Portrait of an Old Woman

In 1634 van Dyck came back to the Southern Netherlands and stayed about a year, taking commissions in Antwerp and Brussels from sitters who were not royalty. This portrait belongs to that world. An elderly woman sits in black with her hands folded, wearing the stiff pleated ruff that court fashion had already dropped and that older, prosperous townspeople went on wearing.

The Brussels museum gives the picture to van Dyck plainly, with no qualifier about a workshop or a follower, and calls the sitter nothing more than an elderly lady. There is a companion piece, an elderly man of the same size, catalogued as its pendant. Both were given to the museum in 1942 by Count Georges della Faille de Leverghem of Brussels. They were entered one after the other as 6255 and 6256, and no names came with them.