Portrait of the mother of the artist Justus Sustermans

This is a portrait of one Flemish painter's mother by another. Justus Sustermans had left Antwerp as a young man and settled in Florence, where he became court painter to the Medici, the ruling family of Tuscany, and Italianised his name to Giusto. Van Dyck, a fellow Fleming, is thought to have painted Sustermans's elderly mother around 1640, near the end of his own life. The identification of the sitter rests on tradition rather than a signature or document, so her name reaches us only through that link to her son. It is a fitting reason for the picture to hang in Florence, the city where Sustermans spent his long career painting grand dukes and their families, and where he died in 1681.