Portrait of Karel van Mallery

Back in Antwerp after his years in Italy, Van Dyck started an ambitious print project around 1630 that he called the Iconography, a gallery of the age's famous faces, princes and generals and scholars and artists, sold as engravings. To guide the engravers he dashed off small oil sketches almost entirely in grey, working fast, catching a likeness rather than finishing a picture. This is one of them. The sitter is Karel van Mallery, himself an Antwerp engraver, a colleague of Van Dyck's rather than a prince. Lucas Vorsterman later cut the plate from this study. Van Mallery holds up his left hand with two fingers parted in a V whose meaning nobody has been able to explain.