Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy

In 1651 a Spanish commander in Flanders, the Count of Fuensaldaña, bought 44 paintings in London, using the Antwerp painter David Teniers as his agent. London was a buyer's market that year. The king, Charles I, had been executed in 1649 and his collection was being sold off, and Spanish agents were in the city picking things up. One of the pictures on Fuensaldaña's list is described as a Saint Francis with an angel coming down from heaven, by van Dyck, and it is probably this canvas. Francis lies back on a rock after meditating on death, which is what the skull, the cross and the book beside him are for, and an angel plays music to comfort him, an episode from the Little Flowers of Saint Francis. It was painted in Antwerp somewhere between 1627 and 1632. By the end of the century it had reached the Spanish royal collection, handed over by the Marquis of Carpio's heirs against a debt.