Portrait of Thomas Howard, 21st Earl of Arundel

On 17 July 1620 Francesco Vercellini, secretary to the Earl of Arundel, wrote to his employer from Antwerp about a painter he thought worth having: a young man of one-and-twenty whose work was scarcely less esteemed than his master's. The difficulty, he added, was that the family had money, so he would be hard to shift.

Four months later the report in London was that van Dyck had come anyway, with a pension from James I. He stayed into February 1621, and this portrait belongs to those months.

Arundel had been buying antique sculpture since a journey through Italy in 1613 and 1614 with the architect Inigo Jones, and no one in England collected on his scale. In his left hand he holds the gold medallion of Saint George, the badge of the 24 knights of the Order of the Garter.

Arundel's house on the Strand is also where van Dyck is thought to have seen paintings by Titian for the first time.