Autoportrait avec Sir Endymion Porter

By the mid-1630s Anthony van Dyck was the most sought-after painter in England, knighted and installed as principal painter to King Charles the First. This double portrait pairs him with a friend, Endymion Porter, a courtier who bought pictures across Europe for the king's famous collection. The two men stand close, a bare rock between them, Porter in solid dark cloth and van Dyck in shimmering silk with one hand near his own chest. It is partly a statement of arrival, a Flemish painter, son of an Antwerp merchant, shown as the social equal of an English gentleman of the court. Within a decade both their worlds came apart. Van Dyck died in 1641, and the civil war that followed scattered Charles's collection and ruined many of the men, Porter among them, who had helped to build it.