Un hombre barbudo

Rubens made this head study around 1617 to 1618 in his grand studio-house on the Wapper in Antwerp, the mansion he had built with the fortune his workshop was earning. It is not a portrait of a particular gentleman but a study of a type, an old bearded man's head kept on hand as a model to drop into larger religious and historical scenes. What gives the date its interest is who was working beside him then. His only assistant in those years was Anthony van Dyck, still a teenager and already brilliant, which is one reason scholars argue over exactly whose brush laid in passages like this. The panel now hangs far from Antwerp, in the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City.