With Christian Bruce, Countess of Devonshire, the Dutchman van Dyck shows that he is to British aristocratic portraiture what Spicy Hot Cheetos are to messy snacks: essential. 

Van Dyck and his sitter were the muses of English-language poets trying to capture in verse just a smidgen of a legendary character. Van Dyck was one of the fanciest and most expensive portraitists, with an efficiency and speed that would make Andy Warhol jealous. But with success came green envy, and, if they'd had Twitter in the 17th century, van Dyck would have had to hire some hacker muscle to drown out the voices of people throwing shade on him for his allegedly "seductive" way with his sitters. It's not that van Dyck attempted to seduce anyone, but sitting for him was such an enormous honor that the act of him translating someone's powdered and coiffed visage into a timeless painting was enough to create all kinds of buzz, both good and volatile. 

The rumors and legends spread among those who didn't have the opportunity or the finances to sit for him. In The Ball, by the English playwright James Shirley, a male character describes to a woman, Rosamund, who is courting a Lord, the Dutch painter's influence on English society, detailing the stretch of van Dyck's influence and the ribaldness of court life: "Trust, while you live, the Frenchman with your legs" (as a dance teacher), but "your face with the Dutch…let me commend, upon my credit, a precious workman to your ladyship." "What is he?" Rosamund asks. "Not an Englishman, I warrant you," the man replies. The Dutch painter, he continues, is "One that can please the ladies every way."

Christian Bruce, before her marriage to a Count (not the Count from "Sesame Street," we can  assume, but another, less mathematical one), was the "Platonic mistress of William, earl of Pembroke," who wrote an entire volume of "poems in her praise." However, "the characteristically unreliable and incompetent editor of this whimsical compilation was John Donne Jr (1604-63)," son of the famous poet, who "managed to incorporate a number of other miscellaneous poems of uncertain or spurious authorship, presumably to flesh out the volume for commercial purposes." Unfortunately for Donne, it didn't sell. 

"This countess in the flower of her age," wrote Edmund Burke, "was, like the Queen of Bohemia, the theme of the wits and poets of the court," and "nor were politics neglected by a lady so exquisitely tinctured with a knowledge of the world." The Countess's mother, Magdalen Clerk, was from the tiny Scottish village of Culross, a filming location of "Captain America: The First Avenger" (2011). In 1822, Christian Bruce, Countess of Devonshire hung in Tottenham House, a Grade I listed house in Wiltshire, England, with grounds partly designed by Capability Brown, where Radiohead recorded part of their album In Rainbows.