Isabella Brant

In the autumn of 1621 the young Anthony van Dyck was packing to leave Antwerp for Italy, where he would spend six years studying the Italian masters. Before he went, he painted this portrait of Isabella Brant and left it behind as a gift for her husband, his teacher and sometime rival Peter Paul Rubens. Van Dyck was barely 22 and already this sure with a brush, catching her warm, half-smiling glance and the sheen of her red-and-gold dress. Rubens is said to have praised the likeness for the rest of his life. There is a quiet sadness in that fondness now, because Isabella had only a few years left. She died in 1626, at 34, in one of the plague outbreaks that swept the city.