Magistrate of Brussels

Magistrate of Brussels is an oil-on-canvas sketch of an unidentified magistrate painted by Anthony van Dyck around 1634, now in a private collection on long-term loan to the Rubenshuis. It is an unfinished preparatory study for van Dyck's much larger group portrait Magistrates of Brussels, a Brussels town hall commission that was destroyed in the French bombardment of the city in 1695 and now survives only in written descriptions and studies such as this one. The sketch itself dropped out of sight for centuries before it was rediscovered in 2013 after being brought to an episode of the BBC television program Antiques Roadshow, where the art historian Philip Mould valued it at 300,000 to 400,000 pounds, one of the highest valuations ever placed on an item on the program. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/