Portrait of Jacques Le Roy, Lord of Herbaix

By 1631 the Spanish Netherlands had been back at war with the Dutch Republic for a decade, and Jacques Le Roy worked inside that administration. He held a senior post under the Spanish government in the Netherlands, with responsibilities in military affairs, and sat as a councillor on the Brabant chamber of commerce, which he went on to head in 1632. A year before this portrait he had acquired the estate and title of Herbaix, and van Dyck gives the new lord the full apparatus of standing: a heavy fur-lined gown, a starched millstone ruff, a red curtain behind him. His name reaches us through an engraving made after the painting by Adriaen Lommelin and published in Antwerp in 1654, which records both the sitter and the date. Van Dyck painted his son Philippe and Philippe's bride Marie de Raet at full length as well, and those two are now in London, in the Wallace Collection.