This was until recently believed to be a contemporary copy after a lost Van Dyck portrait. It has however been convincingly suggested that this is the Van Dyck original; the handling certainly has the freshness and vigour of an original rather than a copy and the quality is sufficient to suggest Van Dyck's hand.

The sitter cannot be identified but the portrait belongs to the artist's second Flemish period (c.1630), when he painted a number of heads which are loosely finished and many of them, like this one, set in a fictive oval frame by a later hand. It has been suggested that they may have been from-the-life studies for Van Dyck’s most prestigious commission, the group portrait of 23 Brussels city councillors, destroyed in 1695.