Brustbild eines Apostels mit gefalteten Händen

The museum dates this head of an apostle with folded hands to 1618–1620 and catalogues it as inventory 790F; the German title means “head of an apostle”. Van Dyck was born in Antwerp in 1599; he was a master of the Antwerp guild by 1618 and worked in Rubens’s studio in those years, leaving for Italy late in 1621. The support is paper laid down on an oak panel, and the museum records the painted surface as 58.3 × 46.6 cm. The picture was transferred to the Berlin galleries in 1906 from the collections of Kaiser Wilhelm II, in the years when the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum was filling its halls on the Museumsinsel. Van Dyck went on from Antwerp to Genoa and Palermo and finally to the court of Charles I in London, where he painted the Caroline court and died in 1641; the small oil sketches and heads of his Antwerp years are the earliest surviving measure of the hand that would later transform English portraiture. The painting is held in the Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.