Portrait of painter Quintijn Symons

The man in black is Quintijn Simons, a history painter from Brussels, so this is one artist portraying another. Van Dyck made it in the 1630s, on a trip back across the Channel after he had become court painter in London, and he gave a colleague the look he usually gave nobles. The cloak is slung loosely over the shoulders and the pleated collar falls wide. Beside him, an opening shows clouds drifting over dark trees. He also included Simons in his Iconography, a series of engraved portraits of famous contemporaries. The first recorded owner of this canvas was Peeter Stevens, the Antwerp cloth merchant whose own portrait by Van Dyck hangs in the same museum. The two pictures later reached Prince William V of Orange, and spent 1795 to 1815 in Paris after the French confiscated them.