Study of the Head of an Old Man

Look closely and this head shows its seams. The face is painted on a sheet of paper about 40 centimetres high, glued to wood, with strips added around it later, perhaps by van Dyck himself. The Louvre thinks the paper was cut from a larger sheet showing the same bearded man from different angles, like a double head study in the Rockox House museum in Antwerp. Heads like this were working material, painted from life and saved for bigger pictures. This one may have been meant for an apostle, or for a religious painting such as the Saint Jerome now in Rotterdam. It probably dates from around 1616, and the museum's catalogue of its van Dyck paintings, published in 2023, begins with it. It came to the Louvre in 1869 in the bequest of Louis La Caze, a Paris doctor who collected old masters.