Portrait of an unknown Genoese woman, 1622-1623

For most of its life this portrait hung in a dining room outside Glasgow. Sir Archibald Campbell bought it for Garscube House in the early 19th century, and the German art historian Gustav Waagen saw it there in 1851 while working through British private collections. It had been painted a long way from Scotland, in Genoa, where van Dyck spent the early 1620s taking commissions from the city's banking and shipping families. The sitter's name did not survive the journey. One Genoese family name has clung to her by tradition, with nothing solid behind it, which is why the picture is catalogued simply as an unknown woman. Glasgow borrowed it for Kelvingrove from 1946 to 1976, then gave it back. The city only came to own it in 2021, when the government accepted the painting in place of 2.45 million pounds of inheritance tax, and it is the first van Dyck Glasgow has owned.