Wolfgang Wilhelm, Herzog von Pfalz-Neuburg

In 1613 Wolfgang Wilhelm, heir to the small duchy of Pfalz-Neuburg on the Danube, converted to Catholicism in secret in Munich, married a Bavarian duke's daughter, and announced the change publicly the following May in Düsseldorf. His father was a convinced Lutheran and took it badly. The switch carried Wolfgang Wilhelm out of the Protestant camp into the Catholic one, and it paid. He was given the Order of the Golden Fleece in 1615 and made a grandee of Spain by Philip IV in 1624. In Neuburg he made Catholicism compulsory, and officials there converted or left.

Van Dyck painted him in Antwerp around 1628, in black, at full length, the format kept for sovereign rulers. The dog is not a piece of furniture. Wolfgang Wilhelm bred hunting dogs and mastiffs and had himself painted with one of his own, and versions and copies of the portrait were made and handed out.

The canvas came to Bavaria in 1806 with the Düsseldorf gallery. It hangs now in the palace at Neuburg an der Donau, where he was born in 1578.