Un soldado a caballo

Van Dyck was about 17 when he painted this. Born in Antwerp in 1599, he had trained from the age of ten and was already working with a confidence most painters reach decades later, a year or so before he entered the studio of Rubens, the towering figure of Flemish art. You can see the ambition in the subject, a mounted soldier turning in his saddle, the kind of swagger Rubens had made fashionable. An army officer named John Guise left the picture to Christ Church in Oxford in 1765, and it hung there for over two centuries. In March 2020 thieves broke into the college gallery and took it, along with two other paintings. It has not been recovered.