Self-portrait

Van Dyck painted himself here as a boy of about 18, his face turned over his shoulder, framed by loose brown curls against a plain dark ground. In Antwerp around 1617 that confidence was earned. He had trained since childhood, was already running a busy workshop, and within a year or two would enter the painters' Guild of Saint Luke and go to work alongside Rubens, who called him the best of his pupils. The white collar catches the light almost like a halo around the young head. He would leave for Italy and then England, become the defining portraitist of the court of Charles the First, and paint a long line of noblemen with exactly this cocked, appraising glance. He gave it to himself first, before he had the titles to go with it.