Flemish school of the seventeenth century. Circle of ANTON VAN DYCK (Antwerp, Belgium, 1599 - London, 1641)."Bust of an old man as an apostle."Oil on canvas. Relined painting.19th century frame.Measurements: 35 x 28 cm; 43 x 36 cm (frame).The formal characteristics of the present canvas allow us to place it in the circle of Anton van Dyck, a key painter of the Flemish Baroque and one of the most important portraitists of the entire 17th century. Anton Van Dyck began his training with Van Balen, a Romanist painter, in 1609. In 1615-16 he worked with Jordaens, and between 1617 and 1620 with Rubens, who said that he was his best pupil. In 1620 he visited England for the first time, in the service of James I, when he was only twenty-one years old. In London he enjoyed greater freedom and left aside religious painting to devote himself fully to portraiture. Between 1621 and 1627 he completed his training with a trip to Italy, being particularly impressed by Bolognese painting and the works of Titian. It was in Italy where he achieved his mature, refined and elegant style, as well as configuring his type of portrait, which became a model for Western painting. In Italy his fame as a portrait painter was also established, and he enjoyed immediate success wherever he worked, painting portraits of the most important noble families in Italy, as well as the Pope and various members of the Roman Curia. In 1629 he was again in London, this time working for King Charles I, who admired Titian's work and saw in Van Dyck his heir. Thus, he dismissed all his painters, having found in Van Dyck the court painter he had wanted for years. In 1640, on the death of Rubens, the painter returned to Antwerp to finish the works he had left unfinished. The following year he moved to Paris, where he painted the wedding portrait of King William II and Princess Mary. That same year he returned hastily to London for health reasons, dying shortly thereafter at his home in the English capital. Anton Van Dyck is represented in major museums around the world, such as the Louvre, the Prado, the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna, the National Gallery and the British Museum in London, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Metropolitan in New York.