Head of a Young Man

A pale-skinned young man shown from the chest up cuts his light-brown eyes sharply to one side, copper-brown hair puffed around his ears and curling on his forehead, cheeks flushed vivid pink, a sliver of white catching light at the neckline of his coffee-brown garment against a dark brown ground — a boldly brushed head alive with rapid strokes and thick impastos of paint. Anthony van Dyck painted this dynamic figure study in the late 1610s while working in Peter Rubens’s workshop, and such head studies served as models for figures in larger compositions: van Dyck reused this very face for an apostle in his Christ Healing the Paralytic, and Rubens adopted it for a soldier in his Decius Mus tapestry series. Painted on paper and later mounted to a panel after the artist’s death, the study is framed to reveal only the original paper support as van Dyck intended. It entered the National Gallery of Art in 1953 as the bequest of Adolph Caspar Miller. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.