Anthony van Dyck, 'Portrait of a Woman and Child', about 1620-1

The glorious colours in this portrait are equalled by the delicacy and sensitivity with which Van Dyck has captured an intimate moment between us and an unknown woman and her little boy. She looks out at us with a shy half-smile that seems to invite us to share in her pride in the child.

The woman wears the formal clothing of an affluent bourgeois wife: a black silk dress with an elaborate gold stomacher, and fine lace and jewellery at her wrist. The enormous, exaggerated ruff round her neck was worn in the Netherlands long after it had become outdated in the rest of Europe. The child has a miniature version round his neck, keeping to the older tradition as well. It’s the hat that marks him as a boy; voluminous skirts were standard for all children. Boys were formally ‘breeched’ (dressed in a form of trousers called breeches) around the age of five. At this point, a father would become more involved in his child’s upbringing. It’s thought that the boy’s gaze and vivacious gesture towards the left may suggest that there was once a portrait of the father that would have hung next to this one, but which is now lost.

Van Dyck’s use of colour and texture in this painting is superb. The sheen of the woman’s black satin is rich and intense. The white of her ruff seems to make her pale skin glow and the interlaced pattern of hands foreshadows Van Dyck’s later preoccupation with the portrayal of long, slender fingers. The child’s sleeves are decorated with gold filigree feathers that echo the gold of his mother’s stomacher, and his lace cuffs rival hers for fineness. The soft lilac colour of his skirts is unusual and striking, and the mother catches up one corner of his white pinafore to show it off to advantage – perhaps to demonstrate that no expense has been spared in her little one’s attire. Behind the couple, a curtain is lifted to show a grey sky with a glimmer of light that throws the minimal landscape into silhouette. But the curtain is a deep, opulent crimson, just enough to enrich the picture and give it sparkle. It lifts the image and balances the whites, which would otherwise be too glaring.

During his early career, Van Dyck lived in Antwerp. He painted some of his least formal portraits in the city, mostly – like this one – of the bourgeois citizens and their families (Portrait of Cornelis van Geest, a subtle and sympathetic study of an old man, is also in the National Gallery’s collection). The paintings Van Dyck made in Antwerp have more in common with the works of Rubens, his teacher, than they do with his later portraits of aristocrats, made when he was in England.