Lady with Studies of Her Hands

A woman occupies the left side of Anthony van Dyck’s sheet, while two much larger studies of hands fill the space beside her. The arrangement invites the eye to move between a whole figure and its parts. Dress, posture and gesture receive different kinds of attention, making the drawing an absorbing record of a portrait taking shape.

A figure assembled through different kinds of marks

The long dress gives the woman a substantial presence, although her face remains faint. A broad collar crosses her upper body; sleeves swell around the arms and gather into smaller folds. Below the waist, lines run almost the length of the page. Some make sharp turns, some break off, and others approach the same edge from a slightly different direction. Together they establish the weight and spread of the skirt without enclosing every part of it.

Van Dyck’s attention is especially easy to follow along the figure’s right-hand outline as we see it. Firm dark strokes mark the shoulder and the outer edge of the sleeve. Lower down, a descending contour helps the dress stand apart from the paper. Inside that boundary, the chalk becomes more searching. Short angles collect around the elbow and waist, where the fabric changes direction. Longer strokes carry the eye towards the floor.

The skirt consequently feels both heavy and mobile. Its broad sweep anchors the figure, but the irregular paths within it suggest folds that could settle in more than one way. A few strong accents do much of the work. Van Dyck does not need to fill every interval with shading to give the body room inside the clothes.

The pale, lightly indicated features have little of the emphatic dark structure seen in the sleeve and skirt. We can register a face and the turn of a head, but the sheet does not offer a fully developed likeness. Attention moves towards the width of the collar, the relation of the arms to the waist, and the long descent from bodice to hem.

Why enlarge the hands?

The two detached studies on the right change the scale of the drawing. The upper hand reaches almost horizontally towards the sheet’s edge. The lower one descends from an angled wrist, its fingers pointing towards the bottom of the page. Neither belongs at that size beside the figure. Each occupies its own area of paper, allowing the hand to become the principal subject for a moment.

That enlargement makes small decisions visible. In the upper study, the fingers form a long, uneven fan. They share a general direction but do not collapse into one straight shape. White chalk crosses the broad area of the hand and wrist, while darker touches pick out divisions and edges. The effect depends on the relationship between the fingers as much as on the outline of any single one.

The lower study is more vertical and more angular. A bright passage near the wrist turns into darker, narrow strokes below. The spread of the fingers creates a tapering shape with small openings between its parts. Looking from one study to the other, we move from an extended horizontal gesture to a hanging one. This contrast would matter in a portrait: a hand can widen a composition, direct attention sideways or carry a line down through the dress.

Within the full figure, the hands are less clearly resolved. The enlarged versions offer room to consider shapes which would otherwise be compressed among the folds at the waist. They make gesture a separate problem, even as the larger figure shows where gesture must eventually work with clothing and posture.

The Frick’s account describes separate hand studies of this kind as rare in Van Dyck’s surviving drawings. ^[2] Their interest here goes beyond anatomical detail. Compare how the upper study’s white accents join the fingers into a broad surface, while the lower study’s dark marks break that surface into more distinct lengths. The sheet holds more than one way of making a hand legible.

Letting the paper take part

Much of the drawing’s middle tone is already present before the chalk is considered. The exposed paper runs continuously through the face, dress, hands and surrounding space. Dark marks can move away from that tone into shadow, and white marks can move towards light. This gives even a brief passage a useful range.

Look at the lower skirt. White lines follow selected folds, while dark strokes gather beside them or change direction across them. The two colours do not form a uniform pattern. At some points they nearly meet, creating a crisp turn; elsewhere a broad interval of paper remains between them. That interval can read as a stretch of fabric without needing to be covered.

The same economy operates in the detached hands. White chalk supplies broad light passages, but much of the form remains the colour of the sheet. The eye joins the partial indications. On the figure, this openness also lets the pale face coexist with the more forcefully drawn costume. Every part does not need the same degree of finish for the body to be readable.

The Frick’s 2016 entry describes grey-green paper that was formerly blue, differing from the Met’s terminology above. ^{[1] [2]} These descriptions leave the reason for the difference unexplained. In the reproduced image, the warm ground is conspicuous. Its role as a middle tone remains visible whatever terminology is used for it.

A guide whose purpose could remain flexible

The woman is unidentified. The Met associates the sheet with a portrait in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek and dates its costume to 1627–32 or 1634–35, during Van Dyck’s Antwerp and Brussels years. The Frick qualifies the relationship: the drawing may have served as a general guide, with the painting departing from it. ^{[1] [2]}

That possibility suits what can be seen on the page. The figure is sufficiently developed to test the broad distribution of collar, sleeves and skirt. The separate hands allow particular gestures to be examined more closely. The face, meanwhile, remains lightly indicated. These different levels of attention could be useful together without making the sheet an instruction to reproduce every contour exactly.

The setting receives little attention: there is no developed interior to explain where the woman stands, and little around the hem to establish a floor. The figure’s organisation has priority.

The empty spaces help us recognise those priorities. The hands do not share a believable room with the woman; they share a working surface. Their placement lets us compare individual forms with the body they might help articulate. For a wider view of these varied uses of paper, see Van Dyck’s drawings .

The sheet as a collected object

The Met lists Lankrink, Richardson, Hudson, Reynolds, Schwiter, Madrazo, Dubaut and Chaikin as former owners, and records several collectors’ marks. With Baker, the Frick counts nine painter collectors. The recorded “A.V. Dyck” inscription does not by itself establish an autograph signature. ^{[1] [2]}