Self-portrait

This self-portrait has two dates, and an X-ray shows why. Van Dyck first painted it around 1620 or 1621 in Antwerp, before he left for Italy, and in that first version his right arm was raised, the hand resting languidly against his chin. When he came home in 1627, after six years in Italy, he reworked the canvas. The arm now lies along the lower edge of the picture, a pose the museum traces to Italian portraits, and he added a gold chain, the honour the Duke of Mantua had conferred on him in 1622. Back in Antwerp he needed sitters, and the museum reads the repainted picture as his advertisement to them, a painter already distinguished at an Italian court. It came to Munich in 1806 with the gallery from Düsseldorf.