This painting is a copy of a portrait by the famous artist Anthony Van Dyck. James Stuart, Duke of Richmond and Lennox, is depicted clothed in a loose white blouse and framed in a background of red drapery. He sits on a chair upholstered in hide. An adoring dog stares up devotedly at Stuart’s face, and against the wall is shown a halberd, hinting at the sitter’s military prowess and, perhaps, leadership.

Van Dyck’s fame, and the fame of the sitter, meant that the original copy of this work was probably copied several times. Like all his family, James Stuart was steadfastly loyal to King Charles I; he was to lose three brothers in the Civil War. He was one of five peers who offered themselves to Parliament for ‘punishment’ (i.e. execution) in place of the king, but to no avail. When the king himself was executed, Stuart was one of those entrusted with overseeing his burial in the Royal Chapel at Windsor.

Van Dyck painted James Stuart, Duke of Richmond and Lennox, when the Duke was a glamorous young man and when he was an adult. This painting shows him in a relaxed, informal setting, with the same dog as in an earlier c.1633 portrait. While the depiction of a greyhound may refer to the sitter’s love of the hunt, there is an old legend which says that Van Dyck painted this dog because he had saved his master’s life during Stuart’s travels on the continent, and there was a great attachment between them.