Ritratto di Mary Hill, Lady Killigrew

Van Dyck painted this in 1638, near the end of his life, while he was the star portraitist at the court of Charles I in London. It is one of a pair. The sitter, Mary Hill, was the wife of Sir William Killigrew, a courtier and later a playwright, and Van Dyck painted the two of them as companion portraits made to hang side by side, each turned slightly toward the other. At some point the couple were split up and sold separately, and they spent more than 150 years apart in different collections. Tate bought the husband in 2002 and then, by luck, managed to acquire the wife when she surfaced at a New York auction the next year, hanging the two of them together again.