Portrait de Sir William Killigrew

Van Dyck painted this in 1638, near the end of both their worlds. Sir William Killigrew was a courtier and playwright at the court of Charles the First, and Van Dyck was the king's Flemish star portraitist, the man who taught English aristocrats how to look effortless. Killigrew leans against a stone column in black satin, calm and assured. He was anything but. In these years he had sunk money into a huge, doomed scheme to drain the Lincolnshire fens, and it was bleeding the family. Within four years civil war broke out, the court dissolved, and Van Dyck was dead. Tate owns a matching portrait of his wife, Mary, painted the same year, the two reunited after long being apart.