Portrait of the Sculptor Georg Petel

In 1628 the Bavarian sculptor Georg Petel was in Antwerp, working closely with Rubens. He was not yet 30, the son of a cabinetmaker from Weilheim, south-west of Munich, and already known as one of the finest ivory carvers of his time. Around that year he carved the ivory for a salt cellar Rubens had designed for his own household, a Triumph of Venus mounted in gilded silver by the Antwerp silversmith Jan Herck and now kept at the Royal Palace in Stockholm. Van Dyck had met Petel years before in Rome, and he painted this portrait during the 1628 stay. He gives him the far-off gaze common in portraits of artists, which the Alte Pinakothek reads as a sign of the thinking that goes into making art. Petel settled in Augsburg and became one of the leading German sculptors of the Baroque, and he died there in the mid-1630s, in his early thirties.