Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester (1640-1660)

In June 1658 a Spanish army met the French and Cromwell's English troops in the dunes outside Dunkirk. Fighting on the Spanish side were two sons of the executed King Charles the First, James and the youngest, Henry, who was not quite 18. That is the reason for the armour. Henry was living in exile in the Spanish Netherlands, for some of those years in Bruges, and this portrait belongs to that moment, around 1659, a year before the monarchy was restored. The composition survives in several versions. The National Portrait Gallery in London catalogues its own as after Boeckhorst, and this canvas was once listed under Willem Wissing, a painter who was still a small child when the prince died. Henry came home with his brother Charles in 1660 and died of smallpox that September, aged 20.