ABSTRACT
Around 1634, the young Henri de Lorraine, later fifth duke of Guise (1614–64) was in Brussels, presumably in attendance at the court of Marie de Medici, the exiled Queen Mother of France, where he sat for his portrait to the celebrated Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck (Plate 3). The artist had previously worked in England, where he had been appointed the official ‘Principal Painter in Ordinary’ to Charles I and Henrietta Maria, but he had recently returned to the Spanish Netherlands, where he would stay for nine months. It was during this period when Van Dyck produced his magnificent, full-length portrait of Henri II de Lorraine (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC), painted in the courtly idiom of the artist's recent swagger portraits of various English aristocratic male sitters. 1
