The Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, Regent of the Netherlands

Alonso Sánchez Coello had painted this woman half a century earlier, a Spanish infanta in court silk at her father Philip II's court in Madrid. Here she is past 60, in the coarse grey habit of the Franciscan third order. She put it on in October 1621, three months after her husband Albert died, and went on governing the Spanish Netherlands from Brussels for 12 more years. The grey wool is dyed, which a Franciscan habit was not supposed to be, and the black veil is mourning. Isabella made van Dyck her court painter in 1628, and that December she gave him a gold chain worth 750 florins. The Louvre's 2023 catalogue of its van Dycks gives this canvas to the painter and his studio, while the museum's online record still lists it under his name alone. The habit itself survives, kept at the Carmelite convent in Brussels that she founded.