Study for the portrait of a standing man

This is a typical example of the kind of portrait study that Van Dyck made, in the words of Roger de Piles, ‘on grey paper, with white and black crayons […] in a quarter of an hour’ (quoted in Van Dyck. The Anatomy of Portraiture, exhib. cat., New York, The Frick Collection, 2016, p. 18). The purpose of these drawings was to sketch a sitter’s ‘shape and drapery’, i.e. his pose and clothes; Van Dyck seems to have been in the habit of recording the face directly on the canvas destined for the finished painting (S. Alsteens ibid., pp. 18-19). The use of blue paper suggests a date after Van Dyck’s return from Italy in 1627, probably in his so-called Second Antwerp Period (1627-1632), before his drawing manner became somewhat more angular (ibid., pp. 27-28). Comparable studies can be found in the Louvre (inv. 19915, 19914) and the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (inv. KdZ 6852; see H. Vey, Die Zeichnungen Anton van Dycks, Brussels, 1962, I, nos. 173, 174, 189, II, figs. 218, 218, 231).