Магистраты Брюсселя

This is a painting almost nobody has seen, because it no longer exists. In the mid-1630s van Dyck, back in Antwerp between spells at the English court, took a large commission for the town hall of Brussels, a group portrait of the city's magistrates gathered around the figure of Justice, a canvas that may have run to some 26 feet across. It hung in the town hall for 60 years. Then in 1695 a French army bombarded Brussels, the town hall burned, and the picture went with it. What survives is the plan, a grey oil sketch squared up for enlarging, now in Paris, together with a handful of oil studies of the individual heads, painted from the men themselves.