The story
In a portrait painted around 1639 by Anthony van Dyck, the Flemish court painter, Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, sits with his wife Aletheia Talbot beside a globe, and the earl points to Madagascar. He was promoting a scheme to colonise the island, which never came to anything. The picture, known as the Madagascar Portrait, still belongs to his descendants and hangs here at Arundel Castle.
Arundel is primarily a castle and a family home, the seat of the Dukes of Norfolk, but it holds a large collection of Howard family portraits. Roger de Montgomery, a cousin of William the Conqueror, raised the first castle around 1067. In the Civil War its royalist garrison surrendered after an 18-day siege in 1643, and the rooms visitors walk through today are largely the work of the 15th Duke, who rebuilt the castle between 1875 and 1905 to designs by the architect Charles Alban Buckler.
The earl in the Madagascar picture was the great collector of his age, a patron of Rubens and Van Dyck. Daniel Mytens, the Dutch painter at the English court, portrayed him and Aletheia around 1618, and Thomas Gainsborough painted Charles Howard, the 11th Duke, in the 1780s. Not every treasure here is a painting. In May 2021 thieves climbed through a window and took gold rosary beads that Mary, Queen of Scots, is said to have carried to her execution in 1587.
