William Feilding, 1st Earl of Denbigh

In 1631 William Feilding sailed for Persia and India on an East India Company ship, with no official post and six servants, a private traveller the Company was not especially keen to carry. He was home by 1633, and van Dyck painted him life-size in what he had brought back, a striped silk jacket and the loose trousers the English would later call pyjamas, finished with the lace collar worn at the court of Charles I. He holds a gun. An Indian boy in gold and a turban points up at a bird in the palm tree above him.

Very little of that setting was seen abroad. The National Gallery, which owns the painting, notes that the parrot is most likely a South American macaw, that the palm looks copied from illustrations rather than from life, and that the boy's clothes appear to have come from the dressing-up box kept in van Dyck's studio. The tree at the Earl's shoulder is an English oak.