Everything about Anthony Van Dyck totally explained
Sir
Anthony van Dyck (many variant spellings;
22 March 1599 –
9 December 1641) was a
Flemish Baroque artist who became the leading
court painter in
England. He is most famous for his portraits of King
Charles I of England and
Scotland and his family and court, painted with a relaxed elegance that was to be the dominant influence on
English portrait-painting for the next 150 years. He also painted
biblical and
mythological subjects, displayed outstanding facility as a draftsman, and was an important innovator in
watercolour and
etching.
Life and work
Education
Van Dyck was born to prosperous parents in
Antwerp. His talent was evident very early, and he was studying painting with
Hendrick van Balen by 1609, and became an independent painter around
1615, setting up a workshop with his even younger friend
Jan Brueghel the Younger. By the age of fifteen he was already a highly accomplished artist, as his
Self-portrait, 1613-14, shows. He was admitted to the Antwerp painters'
Guild of Saint Luke as a free master by February 1618.
Within a few years he was to be the chief assistant to the dominant master of Antwerp, and the whole of Northern Europe,
Peter Paul Rubens, who made much use of sub-contracting artists as well as his own large workshop. His influence on the young artist was immense; Rubens referred to the nineteen-year-old van Dyck as 'the best of my pupils'. The origins and exact nature of their relationship are unclear; it has been speculated that Van Dyck was a pupil of Rubens from about 1613, as even his early work shows little trace of van Balen's style, but there's no clear evidence for this. At the same time the dominance of Rubens in the small and declining city of Antwerp probably explains why, despite his periodic returns to the city, van Dyck spent most of his career abroad..
Italy
In
1620, at the instigation of the brother of the
Duke of Buckingham, van Dyck went to England for the first time where he worked for King
James I and
James VI, receiving £100.
After about four months he returned to Flanders, but moved on in late 1621 to
Italy, where he remained for 6 years, studying the Italian masters and beginning his career as a successful portraitist. He was already presenting himself as a figure of consequence, annoying the rather bohemian Northern artist's colony in
Rome, says
Bellori, by appearing with "the pomp of
Xeuxis... his behaviour was that of a nobleman rather than an ordinary person, and he shone in rich garments; since he was accustomed in the circle of Rubens to noblemen, and being naturally of elevated mind, and anxious to make himself distinguished, he therefore wore - as well as silks - a hat with feathers and brooches, gold chains across his chest, and was accompanied by servants."
He was mostly based in
Genoa, although he also travelled extensively to other cities, and stayed for some time in
Palermo in
Sicily. For the Genoese aristocracy, then in a final flush of prosperity, he developed a full-length portrait style, drawing on
Veronese and Titian as well as Ruben's style from his own period in Genoa, where extremely tall but graceful figures look down on the viewer with great hauteur. In
1627, he went back to Antwerp where he remained for five years, painting more affable portraits which still made his Flemish patrons look as stylish as possible. A life-size group portrait of twenty-four City Councillors of
Brussels he painted for the council-chamber was destroyed in 1695.. He was evidently very charming to his patrons, and, like Rubens, well able to mix in aristocratic and court circles, which added to his ability to obtain commissions. By 1630 he was described as the court painter of the Hapsburg Governor of Flanders, the Archduchess Isabella. In this period he also produced many religious works, including large
altarpieces, and began his printmaking (see below).
London
King Charles I was the most passionate and generous collector of art among the British monarchs, and saw art as a way of promoting his grandiose view of the monarchy. In 1628 he bought the fabulous collection that the
Gonzagas of
Mantua were forced to dispose of, and he'd been trying since his accession in 1625 to bring leading foreign painters to England. In 1626 he was able to persuade
Orazio Gentileschi to settle in England, later to be joined by his daughter
Artemesia and some of his sons. Rubens was an especial target, who eventually came on a diplomatic mission, which included painting, in 1630, and later supplied more paintings from Antwerp. He was very well treated during his nine month visit, during which he was knighted. Charles' court portraitist
Daniel Mytens, was a somewhat pedestrian Fleming. Charles was extremely short (less than five foot tall) and presented challenges to a portraitist.
Van Dyck had remained in touch with the English court, and had helped King Charles' agents in their search for pictures. He had also sent back some of his own works, including a portrait (1623) of himself with
Endymion Porter, one of Charles's agents, a mythology (
Rinaldo and Armida, 1629, now in the
Baltimore Museum of Art), and a religious work for the Queen. He had also painted Charles's sister, Queen
Elizabeth of Bohemia in
the Hague in 1632. In April that year, van Dyck returned to London, and was taken under the wing of the court immediately, being
knighted in July and at the same time receiving a pension of £200 per year, in the grant of which he was described as
principalle Paynter in ordinary to their majesties. He was well paid for paintings in addition to this, at least in theory, as King Charles didn't actually pay over his pension for five years, and reduced the price of many paintings. He was provided with a house on the river at
Blackfriars, then just outside the
City and hence avoiding the monopoly of the
Painters Guild. A suite of rooms in
Eltham Palace, no longer used by the Royal family, was also provided as a country retreat. His Blackfriars studio was frequently visited by the King and Queen (later a special causeway was built to ease their access), who hardly sat for another painter whilst van Dyck lived.
He was an immediate success in England, rapidly painting a large number of portraits of the King and
Queen Henrietta Maria, as well as their children. Many portraits were done in several versions, to be sent as diplomatic gifts or given to supporters of the increasingly embattled king. Altogether van Dyck has been estimated to have painted forty portraits of King Charles himself, as well as about thirty of the Queen, nine of
Earl of Strafford and multiple ones of other courtiers. He painted many of the court, and also himself and his mistress, Margaret Lemon. In England he developed a version of his style which combined a relaxed elegance and ease with an understated authority in his subjects which was to dominate English portrait-painting to the end of the 18th century. Many of these portraits have a lush landscape background. His portraits of Charles on horseback updated the grandeur of Titian's Emperor Charles V, but even more effective and original is his portrait of Charles dismounted in the
Louvre: "Charles is given a totally natural look of instinctive sovereignty, in a deliberately informal setting where he strolls so negligently that that he seems at first glance nature's gentleman rather than England's King" Although his portraits have created the classic idea of "
Cavalier" style and dress, in fact a majority of his most important patrons in the nobility, such as
Lord Wharton and the Earls of
Bedford,
Holbein, van Dyck and his exact contemporary Velasquez were the first painters of pre-eminent talent to work mainly as Court portraitists. The slightly younger
Rembrandt was also to work mainly as a portraitist for a period. In the contemporary theory of the
Hierarchy of genres portrait-painting came well below
History painting (which covered religious scenes also), and for most major painters portraits were a relatively small part of their output, in terms of the time spent on them (being small, they might be numerous in absolute terms). Rubens for example mostly painted portraits only of his immediate circle, but though he worked for most of the courts of Europe, he avoided exclusive attachment to any of them.
A variety of factors meant that in the 17th century demand for portraits was stronger than for other types of work. Van Dyck tried to persuade Charles to commission him to do a large-scale series of works on the history of the
Order of the Garter for the
Banqueting House, Whitehall, for which Rubens had earlier done the huge ceiling paintings (sending them from Antwerp). A sketch for one wall remains, but by 1638 Charles was too short of money to proceed.
A list of history paintings produced by van Dyck in England survives, by Bellori, based on information by
Sir Kenelm Digby; none of these still appear to survive, although the
Eros and Psyche done for the King (below) does.
A fairly small number of
landscape pen and wash drawings or
watercolours made in England played an important part in introducing the Flemish watercolour landscape tradition to England. Some are studies, which reappear in the background of paintings, but many are signed and dated and were probably regarded as finished works to be given as presents. Several of the most detailed are of
Rye, a port for ships to the Continent, suggesting that van Dyck did them casually whilst waiting for wind or tide to improve.
Printmaking
Probably during his period in Antwerp after his return from Italy, van Dyck began his
Iconography, eventually a very large series of
prints with half-length portraits of eminent contemporaries. Van Dyck produced drawings, and for eighteen of the portraits he himself
etched with great brilliance the heads and the main outlines of the figure, for an
engraver to work up: "Portrait etching had scarcely had an existence before his time, and in his work it suddenly appears at the highest point ever reached in the art"
However for most of the series he left the whole
printmaking work to specialists, who mostly engraved everything after his drawings. His own etched plates appear not to have been published commercially until after his death, and early states are very rare. Most of his plates were printed after only his work had been done; some exist in further
states after engraving had been added, sometimes obscuring his etching. He continued to add to the series until at least his departure for England, and presumably added
Inigo Jones whilst in London.
The series was a great success, but was his only venture into printmaking; portraiture probably paid better, and he was constantly in demand. At his death there were eighty plates by others, of which fifty-two were of artists, as well as his own eighteen. The plates were bought by a publisher; with the plates reworked periodically as they wore out they continued to be printed for centuries, and the series added to, so that it reached over two hundred portraits by the late 18th century. In 1851 the plates were bought by the
Calcographie du Louvre.
The
Iconography was highly influential as a commercial model for reproductive printmaking; now forgotten series of portrait prints were enormously popular until the advent of
photography:"the importance of this series was enormous, and it provided a repertory of images that were plundered by portrait painters throughout Europe over the next couple of centuries." Van Dyck's brilliant etching style, which depended on open lines and dots, was in marked contrast to that of the other great portraitist in prints of period,
Rembrandt, and had little influence until the 19th century, when it had a great influence on artists such as
Whistler in the last major phase of portrait etching. Hyatt Mayor wrote: "Etchers have studied Van Dyck ever since, for they can hope to approximate his brilliant directness, whereas nobody can hope to approach the complexity of Rembrandt's portraits"
Studio
His great success compelled van Dyck to maintain a large workshop in London, a studio which was to become "virtually a production line for portraits". According to a visitor to his studio he usually only made a drawing on paper, which was then enlarged onto canvas by an assistant; he then painted the head himself. The clothes were left at the studio and often sent out to specialists. In his last years these studio collaborations accounted for some decline in the quality of work. In addition many copies untouched by him, or virtually so, were produced by the workshop, as well as by professional copyists and later painters; the number of paintings ascribed to him had by the 19th century become huge, as with
Rembrandt,
Titian and others. However most of his assistants and copyists couldn't approach the refinement of his manner, so compared to many masters consensus among
art historians on attributions to him is usually relatively easy to reach, and museum labelling is now mostly updated (
country house attributions may be more dubious in some cases). The relatively few names of his assistants that are known are Dutch or Flemish; he probably preferred to use trained Flemings, as no English equivalent training yet existed. Van Dyck's enormous influence of English art doesn't come from a tradition handed down through his pupils; in fact it isn't possible to document a connection to his studio for any English painter of any significance.
Other uses of van Dyke
- Van Dyck painted many portraits of men, notably Charles I and himself, with the short, pointed beards then in fashion; consequently this particular kind of beard was much later (probably first in America in the 19th century) named a vandyke (which is the anglicized version of his name).
- During the reign of George III, a generic "Cavalier" fancy-dress costume called a Van Dyke was popular; Gainsborough's 'Blue Boy' is wearing such a Van Dyke outfit.
- The oil paint pigment van Dyck brown is named after him (External Link
), and Van dyke brown is an early photographic printing process using the same colour.
- See also several people and places under Van Dyke, the more common form in English of the same original name.
Collections
Most major museum collections include at least one Van Dyck, but easily the most outstanding collection is the Royal Collection, which still contains many of his paintings of the Royal Family. The
National Gallery, London (fourteen works), The
National Gallery of Art in
Washington DC and the
Frick Collection have splendid examples of all phases of his portrait style.
Gallery
Image:Anthonis van Dyck Self Portrait.jpg|"Self Portrait", ca. 1621 Alte Pinakothek
Image:Anthonis van Dyck 016.jpg|Elena Grimaldi, Genoa 1623
Image:Anthonis van Dyck 021.jpg|Marie-Louise de Tassis, Antwerp 1630
Image:HenriettaMariaofFrance03.jpg|Queen Henrietta Maria, London 1632
Image:Charles I with M. de St Antoine (1633); Anthony Van Dyck.jpg|Charles I with M. de St Antoine (1633)
Image:Anthonis van Dyck 027.jpg|James Stuart, Duke of Richmond, ca. 1637
Image:Anthonis van Dyck 001.jpg|Amor and Psyche, 1638
Image:George Digby, 2nd Earl of Bristol.jpg|George Digby, 2nd Earl of Bristol, ca. 1638–9
Further Information
Get more info on 'Anthony Van Dyck'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://anthony_van_dyck.totallyexplained.com">Anthony van Dyck Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
