Portrait of Margaret Lemon as Erminia

In the 1630s van Dyck was the leading portrait painter at the court of Charles I in London, and he gave the whole English aristocracy the elegant, silvery look we still picture them by. This sitter, though, was closer to home. She is Margaret Lemon, his mistress, and he has cast her as Erminia, a heroine from Tasso's poem 'Jerusalem Delivered' who pulls on borrowed armour to ride out and find the crusader she loves. So the hand resting on that breastplate belongs at once to a warrior princess and to the painter's own lover. Almost nothing is documented about Lemon herself, beyond a much-repeated tale that, in a fit of jealousy, she once tried to bite through van Dyck's thumb so he could never paint again.