Portrait of Isabella, Lady de La Warr

When van Dyck painted her, around 1638, Isabella, Lady De La Warr had been a widow for ten years. Her husband, Henry West, Lord De La Warr, died in 1628 at 24, and their son inherited the title. Her father, Sir Thomas Edmondes, was an old diplomat who by then held the post of Treasurer of the King's Household.

The name she carried had already crossed the Atlantic. Her husband's father, Thomas West, had governed the colony of Virginia, and the Delaware River and Delaware Bay were named after him, and later the state.

Van Dyck seems to have built this portrait on one he had made a little earlier of Anne Kirke, a dresser to Queen Henrietta Maria, now at the Huntington in California. In both, a richly dressed woman stands at full length and gestures toward a rosebush, possibly a reference to love. The canvas is more than two metres high, and it stayed with her descendants at Buckhurst Park in Sussex until at least 1877, lent from there to London exhibitions. The museum bought it in 1930 from Otto Gutekunst, a partner in the London dealers Colnaghi, for $121,440.