Rachel de Ruvigny, Countess of Southampton, as Fortune

Rachel de Ruvigny was a French Huguenot who married Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, at the Protestant temple of Charenton outside Paris in 1634, and came to a court whose queen was a French Catholic. In France she had been known as the beautiful and virtuous Huguenot. Here she sits above the clouds in the role of Fortune, one arm laid over a globe of dark crystal.

Van Dyck painted her twice on this scale. Melbourne holds the other canvas, and conservation work there uncovered the white marks he made to place her hair and jewels, the working traces of a portrait taken from the sitter herself. The Cambridge picture sets her foot on a skull and gives her a gold sceptre. She died in childbirth in 1640. Her name was written into the lower corner later by another hand, and the canvas was at Althorp by 1732, reaching the Fitzwilliam in 1978 in place of inheritance tax.