Portrait of Charles I and Henrietta Maria of England

Van Dyck reached London in the spring of 1632 and was knighted that July as painter to the king and queen. His version of those two faces soon became the one Europe knew, worked up again by other hands in studios a long way from Whitehall. This small canvas in the Sala di Apollo is one of those repetitions, and the Palatine Gallery files it under van Dyck's school rather than his own hand, dating it no more closely than the 17th century. The queen beside Charles had a Florentine mother. Henrietta Maria was the youngest child of Marie de' Medici, born in this same palace in 1575 to the grand duke of Tuscany. Charles was executed at Whitehall in January 1649, and Henrietta Maria outlived him by 20 years, dying at Colombes outside Paris.