Portrait of James Stuart, Duke of Lennox

Van Dyck painted James Stuart, Duke of Lennox, around 1633 or 1634, in his first years as Charles I's painter in London. The duke was about 21, a kinsman of the king who would stand by him through the civil war. He poses under a tree in a loose silk shirt, holding a fruit with its leaves still on. The Louvre reads it as an apple, the prize the shepherd Paris gave to the most beautiful goddess. The French court never quite got the picture straight. Louis XIV's inventory of 1683 called it a lemon, by 1793 it was an orange, and a garbled name in a 1709 inventory ended up turning the duke into a French count. The young Marcel Proust knew him as the Duke of Richmond and put him in a poem in 1896, down to the stone at his collar, which he called a sapphire.