An art collector and patron, Arundel was the most influential connoisseur of his age. He is described as 'one that loved and favoured all arts and artists in great measure and was the bringer of them in to England'. He fostered the careers of Inigo Jones, Daniel Mytens, Wenceslaus Hollar, Van Dyck, and Rubens, who called him 'one of the evangelists of art'; the major influence on the connoisseurship of the royal family, and on the formation of artistic taste amongst the aristocracy and gentry; he withdrew to a self-imposed exile during the Civil War but made his Royalist sympathies clear by donating £54,000 to the King's cause. This magnificent portrait of the Earl of Arundel shows him not only as a connoisseur – he acquired one of the most important seventeenth-century collections of painting and sculpture – but also with a certain braggadocio, as befitted his status as Earl Marshal.