The Madagascar Portrait of Thomas Howard and His Wife Aletheia Talbot

Around 1639 the Earl of Arundel, Thomas Howard, was seriously entertaining a strange idea: leading an English colony to Madagascar, the great island off the east coast of Africa. Nothing came of it, and he never went. Anthony van Dyck painted this double portrait of the Earl and his wife, Alethea Talbot, at exactly that moment, and the scheme is written into it. Arundel sits beside a large globe and points with one hand at Madagascar. His wife, herself a formidable collector of art, holds a pair of dividers, the instrument for measuring distances on a map. He wears the collar of the Order of the Garter and holds the baton of Earl Marshal, so this is a man near the top of Charles I's court picturing an empire he would not get. The picture is still called the Madagascar Portrait for that pointing hand.