Lamentation sur le Christ mort

Van Dyck painted the dead Christ mourned by his family several times across his career, and this is one of the last of them. By the late 1630s he was the most sought-after portraitist in Europe, court painter to Charles the First in London, yet he kept returning to this quiet religious subject. He gives the body the smooth, idealised beauty of an antique statue rather than the wounds of a real corpse, softening the grief into something almost serene. It is reckoned the finest of the several versions he made of the scene. The painting passed through an English dukedom and a Spanish collection before reaching the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum in 1985.