Ritratto di Anna Wake

On 12 March 1628, in Antwerp, the wealthy cloth merchant Peeter Stevens married Anna Wake, the 22-year-old daughter of an English Catholic trader who was a friend of Rubens. Van Dyck painted her that year, almost certainly to mark the wedding, as a companion to a portrait of her husband he had made a little earlier. She turns toward where he would hang beside her, holding a fan of black and white ostrich feathers and dressed in the newest French fashion, which Van Dyck records thread by thread. On the thumb of her left hand sits a square ring, most likely the wedding band itself. Because her portrait was the later of the pair, she ended up placed on her husband's right, the side of honour, a spot usually reserved for the man.