Study of a Woman’s Head Looking Up

Like many of his colleagues, Van Dyck created studies of heads which he then used for larger compositions. Thus he absorbed this study of a young woman into his painting “Moses and the Iron Snake” (Madrid, Prado), in which she returns as a semiunconscious woman, albeit with seemingly even more heightened emotions due to the experience of the miracle cure. As is often the case with van Dyck’s early work, the thickly applied paint and nervous brushstroke serve to enhance the work’s expressiveness.