The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian

Gaspar Roomer was born in Antwerp around 1600 and made his fortune in Naples, trading with the Low Countries, lending money and in time financing King Philip IV of Spain. When he died there in 1674 he owned more than 1,500 paintings. The Alte Pinakothek says this Sebastian was one of his commissions, painted by the young van Dyck in Italy around 1622 or 1623, together with the Susanna and the Elders that Munich also owns. The museum has an earlier Sebastian by him too, and sets the two side by side. This one is darker and warmer, and the highlights on the mane of the white horse and on the rider's clothes are laid on in quick strokes, the way van Dyck had watched Titian and Tintoretto do it. Roomer kept buying Flemish painting for decades. In the late 1630s he ordered a Feast of Herod from Rubens, which is now in Edinburgh.