Portrait de Lady Dorothy Dacre

Van Dyck painted this in England around 1638, near the end of his life and at the height of his run as court painter to Charles the First. For most of a decade he had produced portraits of the king, the queen, and the great families around them, fixing the look of the English court so thoroughly that we still half picture that world through his eyes. Lady Dorothy Dacre stands in white satin, a black veil over one shoulder, pearls at her throat and at her ears. It is the assured, unhurried elegance he gave nearly everyone he painted in those years. Van Dyck died in 1641, a year before civil war broke over the court he had spent his English decade painting.