Saint Jerome

When Rubens died in Antwerp in 1640, this canvas was hanging in his own house. Philip IV of Spain bought it out of the estate along with two other van Dycks that are in the Prado today, and by 1656 it had been sent up to the Escorial to hang in the sacristy. It left Spain during the Napoleonic wars, passed through French and English hands for a century and a half, and reached the Rotterdam collector Willem van der Vorm. His foundation has lent it to the Boijmans since 1972.

A second version of the same saint and the same angel is in Stockholm. In 2009 the museum had both cleaned and set them side by side. The pigments matched exactly. X-rays showed that in the Rotterdam canvas Jerome's red cloak had once been longer and the angel had been shifted, and on that evidence Rotterdam was judged the first of the two. Van Dyck was about 20 when he painted it.