Sixty-Five Pounds and Three Weeks’ Wages
Around 1970, Chris Wright was working as a librarian at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. He bought an oil portrait at a small antique shop in the city for £65, roughly three weeks’ wages. The painting showed a woman in a black habit, rendered in three-quarter bust on a canvas measuring about 32 by 28 inches (81.5 by 70.5 cm). Wright’s assessment was straightforward: an anonymous later copy of a well-known 17th-century composition, in a market where such copies circulated freely. He took it home, hung it above the fireplace mantel, and left it there.
That assessment stood for close to five decades.
The Woman in the Composition
The subject of the portrait was Isabella Clara Eugenia, daughter of King Philip II of Spain. Born on August 12, 1566, she spent her adult life governing from Brussels, first alongside her husband Archduke Albert VII, then alone after his death. Their joint rule ran from May 6, 1598 until Albert died on July 13, 1621. The primary source rounds that span to 22 years; Wikipedia places it closer to 23. Either way, she then governed the Habsburg Netherlands as the representative of Philip IV of Spain until her own death on December 1, 1633.
The black habit she wears in the portrait was not ceremonial dress. After Albert died in July 1621, Isabella joined the Order of Poor Clares as a lay member and adopted their habit. She was governing the Netherlands and wearing that habit when she sat, in 1627, for Anthony van Dyck, who had recently returned from a period in Italy and been appointed her court painter. The verified original from that sitting now hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Van Dyck had likely based the composition on a 1625 portrait of the Infanta by his mentor Peter Paul Rubens, who had served as court painter to Albert and Isabella since September 1609.
By January 2022, scholars had documented 20 surviving versions of that composition, produced across the 17th century when replicating a successful portrait was standard commercial practice in workshops like van Dyck’s.
December 2018: A Visit About Something Else
In December 2018, Colin Harrison, senior curator of European art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, visited Wright’s London apartment to look at a different painting altogether. When he noticed the portrait above the mantel, he told Wright it really looked like a van Dyck. Harrison had worked at the Ashmolean since 1993; this was not a casual remark. It was, however, still only a first professional observation rather than a formal attribution.
Wright had spent his career in proximity to 17th-century art, yet the copy assumption had never been formally tested. Harrison’s comment changed that.
Inside the Courtauld, 2019 to 2022
In 2019, Wright deposited the painting with the Courtauld through its “Painting Pairs: Art History and Technical Study” program. Two students worked the case: Kendall Francis, a conservation student who cleaned the surface and conducted the physical examination, and Timothy McCall, an art history student who handled archival and stylistic research. Their work ran in parallel and merged into a single report.
Cleaning the accumulated surface matter proved consequential: with it removed, the underlying work became legible in new ways.
Infrared reflectography, a technique that reads underdrawings beneath the painted surface, revealed marks consistent with van Dyck’s documented working method in his later career. The handling of the hands matched a specific habit van Dyck is known to have followed: painting them last. The facial brushwork aligned with the treatment found in a separately identified workshop version of the same composition, though the face shows coarser handling than the rest of the canvas. The pigments and materials were consistent with those van Dyck used during the years when the Infanta portrait was produced. The Courtauld report dated Wright’s painting to circa 1628 to 1632.
The investigation concluded formally in January 2022.
What the Report Said, and What It Did Not
The Courtauld report tentatively attributed the painting to van Dyck’s workshop: produced within the professional environment he directed, by methods he used, and completed, in the report’s own framing, during his lifetime and under his supervision. No firm attribution was made. The report stated explicitly that further expert appraisal would be required before any stronger claim could be supported.
A workshop attribution and a direct attribution to van Dyck’s own hand occupy different positions, both in the historical record and in the market. In his later career, van Dyck ran a large studio. Assistants prepared canvases, replicated compositions, and sometimes executed entire paintings under his supervision. How much of Wright’s canvas van Dyck himself touched is a question the available evidence cannot yet settle. The coarser facial brushwork points toward studio involvement rather than resolving it.
£40,000 and a Label at Cannon Hall
Wright estimated the portrait’s current value at approximately £40,000 (around $54,500 at January 2022 exchange rates). That figure reflects a tentative workshop attribution, not a confirmed one. A different finding from future examination would shift it in either direction.
On February 21, 2022, the portrait was scheduled to go on public display at Cannon Hall, a country house museum about 5 miles (8 km) west of Barnsley in South Yorkshire, England. The museum holds the Harvey Collection, 54 paintings focused on Dutch and Flemish works. The portrait was to be displayed alongside an extended label setting out what the investigation had found and where the limits of those findings lay. Cannon Hall curator Natalie Murray was involved in the arrangements.
The painting Wright paid £65 for around 1970 had, by 2022, accumulated an estimated value more than 600 times that purchase price, along with a question the Courtauld’s technical methods could not fully close. That question remains open, as does the portrait’s attribution.