When Anthony van Dyck arrived in Italy in 1621, he carried with him a portfolio of studies like Head study of a woman looking up, completed just two years earlier. These head studies, or tronies, were not formal portraits but explorations of expression, light, and character—tools for larger compositions. Remarkably, this particular study is believed to have served as a model for several of van Dyck’s later religious paintings, its upward gaze recurring in saints and martyrs across his oeuvre.

The immediacy and intimacy of the woman's expression have led some scholars to speculate she may have been a member of van Dyck’s own circle in Antwerp, though her identity remains unknown. The woman’s face is caught in a moment of rapt attention, her eyes lifted toward a source of light just beyond the frame. Her parted lips and the gentle tension in her neck suggest awe, supplication, or perhaps the first stirrings of hope. Van Dyck’s soft handling of the features, with shadow caressing the cheek and brow, focuses all attention on the play of emotion across her face.

Unlike the idealized, remote figures of Rubens, van Dyck’s mentor, here the subject is palpably present, her humanity laid bare. The upward gaze, a motif van Dyck would return to in his depictions of saints like in Saint Rosalie Interceding for the Plague-stricken, becomes a visual shorthand for spiritual longing. The precise journey of Head study of a woman looking up is difficult to trace, as many of van Dyck’s studies were dispersed after his early death in 1641. Works like this were often kept in the artist’s studio, reused as references, and sometimes sold to collectors who prized their immediacy.

While the original patron or owner is not recorded, the study’s survival is testament to its value as both a tool and a finished work. Today, such studies are celebrated for offering a glimpse into van Dyck’s working process at the cusp of his maturity, bridging his formative years in Antwerp with the grandeur of his later commissions in Genoa and London.