Portrait of an old woman

Van Dyck signed and dated this canvas in 1634, and the year places it in an interval. He had been court painter to Charles I in London for two years, but in 1634 he spent months back in the Southern Netherlands, in Antwerp and Brussels, and took commissions there. The sitter is a Flemish townswoman, sure of herself, her name not recorded. Behind her the painter opens a landscape, a device the museum finds in several of his portraits from these years. It gives the picture the softer, slightly wistful tone of his later portraits, which the museum calls elegiac. The inscription at lower left reads A VAN DYCK A° 1634.