Autoritratto

Van Dyck painted himself here as a boy of about 14, around 1613, and it is among the earliest things he left us. He was an Antwerp prodigy, apprenticed to a master while still a child, and already good enough to turn his own face into a finished picture: the fresh skin, the tousled hair, the head twisting round to catch the viewer. He had not yet gone to work alongside Rubens, the older painter who would shape him, nor sailed for the English court where he became Charles the First's portraitist and was knighted. What survives in this small panel is the confidence of a teenager who could already paint. It is kept at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.