Antoine van Dyck

“ The plague drove Van Dyck from Italy back to Flanders, where he painted for a time, and presented his picture of the 'Crucifixion' to the Dominicans as a memorial gift in honour of his father, but in Flanders Rubens' fame overshadowed that of every other painter, and Van Dyck, recalling an invitation which he had received from the Countess of Arundel while still in Italy, came a second time to England, in 1630, when he was about thirty years of age, and lodged again with a fellow-countryman and painter named Gildorp. ”

“ XVI PORTRAIT OF VAN DYCK
The painter Van Dyck was the son of a rich merchant of Antwerp, and lacked no opportunities for the training of his artistic gifts. He was fortunate also in meeting ready appreciation wherever he went. In Italy, in Flanders, and finally in England, his paintings were highly valued. His life was passed amid luxurious surroundings, in the society of noblemen and princes. His was a brilliant and successful career. ”

“ Born and died in Kingston, N. Y. He attended the drawing school of Archibald Robertson, and later studied under Gilbert Stuart. He painted portraits, and in 1796 went to France, where he remained some years. He painted the portraits of many distinguished men, but died poor.
Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641) .
Flemish painter, born at Antwerp. After receiving his first instructions from his father, he studied under Henry van Balen and then entered the school of Rubens, and became a great portrait painter. ”

“ To estimate to the full the revolution he wrought we must compare the masters whom we found installed in favour in Flanders with the school he so soon created. The older painters being affected in so visible a degree, we can quite imagine how easily one so young and impressionable as Van Dyck would submit to the new influence. Here was a master whose art, glowing with the full-blooded vigour of Italy, yet retained the healthy freshness of his native country. Restrained and held in leash as he would be in the studio of Van Balen, we can sympathise with his yearning to migrate to that of Rubens. ”

“ As a portrait-painter Van Dyck may lack the precision of Holbein or tender intimacy of Cornelius Janssen, the directness and amazing technical skill of Velazquez or Frans Hals, the mysterious pathos of Rembrandt; but in his own manner he reigns supreme, and his genius needs no interpreter. It is curious that in England, where his fame ranks so high, Van Dyck's works can be studied only with difficulty, since they are so widely dispersed. ”

“ At the close of these six years of Antwerp work a new world opened to him. His first visit to England seems to have been unfruitful, but in 1632 he became one of the court painters of Charles I. Success and honor now crowned the new works of Van Dyck. He received a salary of £200 a year as principal painter to the Stuart court, and was knighted by the king. Nothing succeeds like success, and we find Van Dyck sought after by the nobility and gentry of England, and at once installed as a fashionable portrait painter. ”

“ From his earliest days he worshipped the great Fleming, and that the spell never left him may be gauged from his dying words: "We are all going to Heaven, and Van Dyck is of the company." Even prior to his departure for Bath, his portraits possessed many of the qualities of Van Dyck, but after arriving in the western city, then the centre of a rich and fashionable world, he had manifold opportunities of studying his favourite master. His brushwork became at once more refined, his colouring more transparent, and his method in every way more facile. ”

“ Among these early works are the “Martyrdom of St Peter” (Brussels) , the “Crowning with Thorns” (Berlin) , the “Betrayal of Christ” (Madrid and Lord Methuen) , “St Martin dividing his Cloak” (Windsor Castle) ,—a magnificent production, generally ascribed to Rubens, but easily identified through Van Dyck’s admirable sketch at Dorchester House.
It is unnecessary to dwell on a number of tales connected with Van Dyck’s early life, all of which have on closer examination proved to be apocryphal; but one story has been too frequently told to be altogether ignored. ”

“ There can be no doubt as to the model having been Margaret Lemon, a celebrated beauty, whose portrait was engraved by W. Hollar and J. Morin and painted by Van Dyck at Hampton Court. “She was,” says Mr Ernest Law, in his excellent catalogue of this gallery, “the most beautiful and celebrated, though far from being the only mistress of Van Dyck. The great artist, in fact, loved beauty in every form, and found the seduction of female charms altogether irresistible. She lived with him at his house at Blackfriars.” The precise date of Van Dyck’s marriage has not been ascertained. ”

“ His father, a well-to-do merchant in Antwerp, where Van Dyck was born in 1599, gave Anthony every opportunity to follow up the art of painting. The boy was for several years a pupil of Rubens, whom he made a little jealous by his success in portrait painting. Some of his pictures were better than Rubens’. A few years in Italy gave Van Dyck a still higher position among artists. Some said he was the best portrait painter in Europe. ”

“ Van Dyck spent five years in Italy, visiting Venice, Florence, Rome, and Palermo, but residing principally at Genoa. In Italy, he began to indulge in his love of splendid extravagance, and in the fastidious fickleness which belonged to the evil side of his character. At Rome he was called 'the cavalier painter,' yet his first complaint on his return to Antwerp was, that he could not live on the profits of his painting! ”

“ This proof of Van Dyck’s personal reputation is fully confirmed (17th July) by a correspondent of the earl of Arundel, who speaks of Van Dyck as a young man of one-and-twenty whose works are scarcely less esteemed than those of his master, and adds that, his relations being people of considerable wealth, he could hardly be expected to leave his home. Van Dyck was, however, thus persuaded, for on 28th November Sir Toby Mathew mentions the artist’s departure to Sir Dudley Carleton, adding that he is in receipt of an annual pension of £100 from the king. ”

“ Whilst we can quite imagine that Rubens would be sorry to part with so capable an assistant, there was not any evidence that he did not do everything in his power to assist him to carry out his project.
In 1623—when he was but twenty-four years of age—Van Dyck left Antwerp on his journey southward. He appears not to have got any further than a village near Brussels, where he succumbed to the attractions of a certain young lady named Annah van Ophem. At her instigation he painted two pictures for the parish church there. In one, representing St. ”

“ When the portrait neared its finish he went over the whole himself, and it is therefore difficult, in the case of many versions of the same portrait of equal excellence, to declare that any one is actually the original. Many of Van Dyck's drawings of this kind are to be found in the British Museum, the Louvre, and other public collections. He is said always to have received his sitters richly dressed himself. Throughout his life in England Van Dyck lived a life of wealth and luxury. ”

“ That he was at the time a portrait painter of the rarest merit may easily be seen from the portrait of “Van der Geest” in the National Gallery (London) , and from his own likenesses of himself when still quite young and beardless, in the National Gallery, in the Pinakothek at Munich and in the Wallace Collection. In this last admirable specimen the young painter has represented himself in the character of Paris. Early paintings by Van Dyck are certainly not scarce in British galleries; at Dulwich there is his admirable Samson and Delilah, ascribed to the school of Rubens. ”

“ If any fault is to be found with them, it might be said that he has invested the rather ordinary burghers and artists of his acquaintance with all the airs and attributes of the oldest nobility or the heroes of romance. Van Dyck no doubt profited greatly by the absence of Rubens on his diplomatic missions to Spain and England. On 18 May 1628 the Earl of Carlisle visited Van Dyck in his house at Antwerp, and met Rubens there. ”

“ Santa Maria Formosa, Venice Please click here for a modern color image
[16]
CHARLES I AND HIS HORSE Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641)
he horse in this picture of Charles I is probably the one Rubens gave to Van Dyck. It is said that Rubens gave it as a present after Van Dyck had painted a portrait of Helena Fourment, the master's second wife, and presented it to him. Van Dyck was twenty-two years younger than Rubens. You will remember that he was the master painter's favorite pupil. Having Rubens as a teacher did not make the pupil a great painter. Van Dyck was never more than a prince ”

“ Everybody is made to pose before posterity; each sitter has the smile to give his or her descendants the most exalted idea of his or her station and manners. Not one is vulgar, not one dares to show himself in his ordinary work, or in the careless good nature of daily life. Nothing alters their immutable serenity; nothing troubles the unalterable placidity of their physiognomy. Let others paint the people of taverns, the world of kermesses and peasants! Van Dyck wished to be and to live for ever the painter of aristocracy. ”

“ The whole course of painting in England was altered by the brilliant career and achievements of Van Dyck. He destroyed the somewhat hard and narrow traditions of portraiture which had obtained before, and established a principle by which nearly all his successors in England have been guided. His merits as an historical painter have received less recognition in England, and even at Antwerp and elsewhere on the continent they have been overshadowed by the overwhelming and colossal genius of Rubens. ”

“ His etchings show various modes of treatment, according to the character of the sitter, and it would be difficult to speak of the development of his art, since, by the grace of God, he seems to have been a born etcher.
Van Dyck’s Portrait of Himself naturally interests us most, on account of its subject. So far as Van Dyck has seen fit to carry it, it is a perfect work of art, not the least remarkable feature being the splendid placing of the head upon the plate. ”

“ This Richardot was a celebrated Flemish diplomat of the sixteenth century, and president of the Privy Council of the Low Countries. As he died in Van Dyck's boyhood, his portrait could not have been made by our painter directly from life. Nor can we believe with some that years after the diplomat's death Van Dyck copied from some old picture the likeness seen here. A portrait painted in this way would not have the vitality of our illustration. We are therefore obliged to consider the picture nameless; but our enjoyment of its good qualities is by no means less keen. ”

“ Upon his return to Antwerp, the six succeeding years gave him the opportunity to work out his own individuality. Some noble altar-pieces were produced in these years. Pleasant reminiscences of Titian still appear in such work, as in the often-used motif of baby angels; but in the subjects of the Crucifixion and the Pietà, he stands quite apart. These works are distinctly his own, and show genuine dramatic power.
During this Flemish period Van Dyck was appointed court painter by the Archduchess Isabella Clara Eugenia, Spanish Regent of the Netherlands. ”

“ Certainly the finest portrait of Charles I. in existence. It shows Van Dyck in his most attractive aspect as a painter of the aristocracy. Executed before the marked decline in his technical powers, which marred, from an artistic standpoint, the later pictures of his English period, it yet possesses the dignity and distinction he knew so well how to infuse in portraying the nobility of our country. It is one of the best examples of the artist's powers as a colourist, and as such will bear comparison with the productions of the mighty Venetians. ”

“ He 'would detain the persons who sat to him to dinner for an opportunity of studying their countenances and re-touching their pictures,' 'would have a sitter, sitting to him seven entire days, mornings and evenings, and would not once let the man see the picture till it pleased the painter.' Van Dyck appears to have been a man with the possibilities in him of greater things than he attained, possibilities which were baffled by his weakness and self-indulgence, leaving him with such a sense of this as spoiled his greatest successes. ”

“ As a new feature we observe a kind of elegance, not entirely free from mannerism, which is often conspicuous with Van Dyck even when the technical excellence commands our warmest admiration. Inspiration, as Waagen observes, was far more limited with Van Dyck than with Rubens. His truly delicate nature led him to restrain his conceptions within the bounds of an academic evenness, generally more pleasing to the uninitiated than the strength of expression which sometimes imparts a sort of violence to the works of Rubens. ”

“ It must be confessed that Van Dyck, disciple though he was [x] of Rubens and Titian, fell below these masters in the art of imparting life to a figure.
In certain mechanical elements of his art Van Dyck was conspicuously deficient. He seemed to have no ingenuity in devising poses for his subjects. Sitting or standing, the attitude is usually more or less artificial and constrained. The atmosphere of the studio is painfully evident. Never by any accident did he seem to catch the sitter off guard, so to speak, except in a few children's portraits. ”