The Apostle Judas Thaddeus

In February 1618 the Antwerp painters' guild admitted a new master who was only eighteen or nineteen. Anthony van Dyck was still the leading assistant in Rubens's crowded workshop, and this panel dates from exactly that moment. It belongs to a set of Christ and the twelve apostles, each a bearded half-length figure filling the frame. The man here is Jude, also called Thaddeus, the kind of weathered older face van Dyck could study from life in the streets of the city. He had probably seen a similar apostle series in Rubens's studio, painted years before for a Spanish patron. The group was broken up long ago. Around 1914 a dealer, Julius Böhler, gathered several of the panels from an Italian collection and sold them off one by one, which is how this Jude came to hang far from the rest, in Metz.