1. Background and early work in Antwerp and London, to autumn 1621.

Anthony van Dyck was the seventh child of Frans van Dyck and Maria Cuypers [Cuperis], who lived at ‘Den Berendans’, a substantial house on the Grote Markt in Antwerp. His father was something of a painter as well as a prominent silk and linen merchant. His mother, who died when he was eight, was known for the beauty of her embroidery. In October 1609 the young Anthony was registered with the Antwerp Guild of St Luke as a pupil of the dean that year, Hendrik van Balen I, a competent painter of small figures who often collaborated with the landscapist Jan Breughel I. He himself was registered as a master on 11 February 1618, and four days later, by his father’s consent, he was declared of age by the Antwerp Tribunal. He had earlier, while still a minor, been involved in legal proceedings, on 3 December 1616 and 13 September 1617, on behalf of himself, his four sisters and his younger brother (his siblings all followed religious callings), to receive part payment of their grandmother’s estate. This was incumbent because his father, formerly well-to-do and respected, the President of the Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament at Antwerp Cathedral, soon after became bankrupt. In order that Anthony’s earnings should not be seized to help pay his father’s debts, in 1620 he set up on his own, renting a house large enough for a studio with assistants, the ‘Dom van Keulen’ in the Lange Minderbroederstraat. There he engaged Herman Servaes and Justus van Egmont to make copies of his several sets of Christ and the Apostles (dispersed). In this, van Dyck followed the example of Rubens, who had assistants to copy (c. 1609–10) the prototype apostelado sent to the Duque de Lerma.

Van Dyck’s series of larger compositions of the period 1616–21, both sacred and profane, were impressively of his own invention: but financial stress, and perhaps the difficulty of placing his early works except on commission, directed his precocious brilliance rather more than he might have wished to a series of three-quarter-length portraits of burghers and their wives (dated examples, 1618; Vaduz, Samml. Liechtenstein, and Dresden, Gemäldegal. Alte Meister). These were evidently inspired by contemporary work by Rubens of this kind, notably the portrait of Jan Vermoelen (1616; Vaduz, Samml. Liechtenstein).

It is not known precisely when or on what terms van Dyck entered the studio of Rubens. The older master, 22 years his senior, must have spotted van Dyck’s potential soon after he himself was established in the mansion he had built (1610–17) on the Meer. Van Dyck as a boy—probably while still in van Balen’s studio—seems to have been uniquely privileged in access to the travelling Pocket-Book of Rubens (surviving in part, and through 17th-century copies), which was later celebrated by Bellori. He plundered its contents extensively, methodically and on occasion wittily into the first of his known sketchbooks, the so-called Antwerp Sketchbook (Chatsworth, Derbys), in which he pocketed a wide range of material, from Giacomo della Porta’s physiognomic comparisons and Serlio’s 4th Book of Architecture to copies of paintings by Titian and recipes for sore eyes and for painters’ materials; the sketchbook also records figures or groups by subject categories from all manner of Italian and northern engravings such as were found in abundance in Rubens’s house. Significantly, there are neither portraits nor records of portraits. Van Dyck’s ambition throughout his working life was to be a history painter.

Writing on 24 April 1618 to Sir Dudley Carleton, English ambassador at The Hague, Rubens offered a painting of Achilles and the Daughters of Lycomedes (Madrid, Prado), valued at 600 guilders. This was ‘fatto del meglior mio discipolo’, then gone over by Rubens himself who was bargaining to part with ‘the flower of my stock’ in exchange for antiquities that Carleton had brought from his previous post, Venice. On the visual evidence of the picture itself, the ‘best pupil’ must have been van Dyck. As Bellori recorded, van Dyck had already served Rubens c. 1616–18 in the preparation of cartoons for the Decius Mus tapestry cycle, which were sent to Brussels to be woven by May 1618. In this project van Dyck’s role was that of chief assistant, transferring the highly complex designs of Rubens’s oil sketches on to canvases of heroic dimensions, painted especially to instruct the draughtsmen regularly employed on preparatory cartoons. Van Dyck also, according to Bellori and Mariette, drew modelletti for engravings intended to register and advertise afar the prowess of Rubens in design.

By 24 March 1620, in Rubens’s contract with the Jesuit Provincial Father Tiry to design 39 ceiling paintings for the aisles and galleries of the Society’s new church in Antwerp, the execution was allowed to be by van Dyck and other unnamed studio assistants. This contract also stipulated that van Dyck might make a painting for one of the four side altars at a later time. Van Dyck’s early assistance to Rubens in painting figures can already be discerned in such religious works as the Virgin and Child with Four Great Penitents (c. 1618; Karlsruhe, Staatl. Ksthalle) and Jesus in the House of Simon the Pharisee (St Petersburg, Hermitage). His blazing idiosyncracies of morphology and brushwork blended with, but were never wholly absorbed by, the more profoundly creative genius of Rubens, who kept for himself eight of van Dyck’s early masterpieces and with whom van Dyck apparently always continued to be on good terms. A letter from Antwerp of 17 July 1620 to Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel, written by Francesco Vercellini, his Venetian gentiluomo then accompanying Lady Arundel on a continental visit, relates that:Van Dyck is still with Signor Rubens, and his works are hardly less esteemed than those of his master. He is a young man of 21 years, with his very wealthy father and mother living in this town, so that it will be difficult to get him to leave these parts, especially since he sees the good fortune enjoyed by Rubens.

In fact, van Dyck’s mother was long dead; and his parents had fallen in fortune. Despite Vercellini’s pessimism, ‘the father of virtù in England’ (i.e. Arundel) was anxious to bring this rising star to London.

On 20 October Thomas Locke wrote to William Trumbull from London: ‘Van Dyck is newly come to town…. I am told my Lo: of Purbeck sent for him hither’. John Villiers, recently created Viscount Purbeck, was half-brother to the royal favourite, the Marquess of Buckingham. On 25 November Tobie Mathew wrote to Carleton at The Hague that King James I had granted van Dyck, Rubens’s ‘famous allievo’, an annual pension of £100. On 16 February 1621 van Dyck received £100 ‘by way of reward for special service performed for his Matie’. What precise service to his Majesty this may have been remains obscure.

Of van Dyck’s paintings, Buckingham acquired the Continence of Scipio (1620–21; Oxford, Christ Church) from Arundel for York House and the Venus and Adonis (1620–21; Harari & Johns, London, 1991, see 1990–91 exh. cat., no. 17), presumably for another of his residences. The latter relates to one of van Dyck’s Antwerp mythologies: it is an allegorical portrait painted in haste to celebrate the flamboyant Buckingham’s betrothal to Lady Katherine Manners, a match regarded by her father as a mésalliance. The first of these two paintings, with full-length figures, evinces van Dyck’s youthful admiration for the scenographic taste of Paolo Veronese whose Esther and Ahasuerus (1556; Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.) was then at York House; the second his facility in adapting to his purpose both Dürer’s engraving of The Promenade (b. 94) and Cesare Ripa’s emblem into a sensuous combination of the learned and the louche, hardly suitable for the burghers of Antwerp, welcome perhaps only at the Stuart court. Of the noble Arundel, van Dyck painted an appropriately sober portrait seated half-length (1620–21; Malibu, CA, Getty Mus.). It was Arundel who on 28 February 1621 signed a travel pass and permit for him for eight months. No other paintings are known of those van Dyck might have done during this first brief stay in England, unless it were one of the self-portraits (see §IV below).

Van Dyck returned to Antwerp in March 1621 for just under eight months to order his family affairs and to prepare for Italy. Usually assigned to this phase of his activity are the portrait of Susanna Fourment and her Daughter and that of Isabella Brant (both Washington, DC, N.G.A.), wonderful presages of the fashion for full-length portraiture that he later developed to gratify the Genoese families. Also datable to this period are the superb St Sebastian Bound for Martyrdom (Edinburgh, N.G.), the Crowning with Thorns and the Betrayal of Christ (versions of both, Madrid, Prado), masterpieces that manifest his urge to be recognized, like Rubens, principally as a composer of altarpieces and other histories at least on the scale of life.

2. Italy and France, autumn 1621–autumn 1627.

Anthony van Dyck: Lucas van Uffel (died 1637), oil on…In October 1621 van Dyck followed Rubens’s example in 1600 by leaving for Italy. It is not clear how long he intended to remain there, nor whether he would have accepted, as Rubens had, princely service at this stage of his career. He arrived in Genoa, the mercantile equivalent of Antwerp, probably by late November, lodging with his countrymen Cornelis and Lucas de Wael, who were established as art dealers and painters of small-figure genre and battle scenes. Van Dyck came unprepared for the sight in the Spinola, Doria and Grimaldi palaces of the astounding advances in fashionable portraiture made by Rubens during his Mantuan service 15 years before; and there can be little doubt that he conceived his standing portrait of Marchesa Elena Grimaldi Cattaneo and his equestrian portrait of Giovanni Paolo Balbi (c. 1625; Parma, Corte Mamiano Found.) to challenge Rubens’s portraits of Brigida Spinola Doria (1606; Washington, DC, N.G.A.) and Gian Carlo Doria (c. 1606–7; Florence, Pal. Vecchio). (For van Dyck’s portrait of the so-called ‘Marchesa Balbi’, c. 1621–2, Washington, DC, N.G.A..) Between November 1621 and February 1622 he painted the portrait mentioned by Bellori of the future Doge Agostino Pallavicini (Malibu, CA, Getty Mus.), voluminously robed in crimson brocade as ambassador from Genoa to the Holy See. This was most likely the first of his grand portraits of Genoese notables. From February 1622 he seems to have been in Rome, filling his Italian Sketchbook (London, BM) with observations from life and from the works that took his eye while visiting churches and collections. He sketched (fol. 62r and v) and then he painted resplendent full-length portraits of Sir Robert Shirley and Teresia, Lady Shirley (both Petworth House, W. Sussex, NT), gorgeous in Circassian dress during their diplomatic mission to Gregory XV between 22 July and 29 August, and half-length portraits of two northern European sculptors, François Du Quesnoy (Brussels, Mus. A. Anc.) and Georg Petel (Munich, Alte Pin.). He then moved to Venice to meet Lady Arundel and to accompany her in November/December to Mantua and Milan. They reached Turin late in January 1623. He probably stopped again in Genoa and also visited Florence and Bologna. He painted in fairly quick succession, either in Venice or in Genoa, two portraits of the merchant Lucas van Uffel (Brunswick, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Mus.; New York, Met.; see fig.), the latter (New York) tense with a dazzling depiction of movement arrested on the instant.

News of the death of van Dyck’s father on 1 December 1622, leaving him worldly care for his siblings, would have reached him in Rome early in the new year. His immediate reaction to private grief was expressed in his most poignant portrait of himself, the Self-portrait with the Broken Column (early 1623; St Petersburg, Hermitage). (The public epitaph would come some six years later with the altarpiece of the Crucifixion with SS Dominic and Catherine of Siena painted soon after his return to Antwerp, in fulfilment of a promise of his father to the Dominican nuns who had nursed his last illness.)

Between March and October or November 1623 van Dyck was again in Rome. He followed the success of his portraits of van Uffel with two portraits of aristocratic persons just as vivid: the full-length of the former Nuncio in Flanders, Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio (1623; Florence, Pitti), seated alert as though giving audience, a state portrait that proved one of the most memorable Baroque achievements of its kind; and, just before that, the three-quarter-length, more intimate revelation of Principe Virginio Cesarini in Jesuit Garb (St Petersburg, Hermitage), seated in an armchair as though in private disputation, his gaze and his gesture alerting the viewer to the frailty of his existence. Radiographs have revealed that beneath the surface of the paint in the latter van Dyck had sketched the contrapposto he had wanted for the portrait of Cardinal Bentivoglio. He also portrayed another cardinal about this time, the Genoese Domenico Rivarola (best-known version in Des Moines, IA State Educ. Assoc.), either in Rome or in Genoa. Certainly it was in Rome that he met Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–65), the English Resident and a future patron. Digby’s recollections of van Dyck became the principal source of Bellori’s Vita of the artist. Significantly, van Dyck was the only Flemish artist, save Rubens and Du Quesnoy, both also active in Rome, who was esteemed enough by Bellori to be included in his publication of 1672.

From autumn 1623 to spring 1624 van Dyck seems to have been in Genoa. In emulation of Titian’s portraits of Clarissa Strozzi (1542; Berlin, Gemäldegal.) and Ranuccio Farnese (1542; Washington, DC, N.G.A.), he revivified a fashion for portraying young children without their parents. The lively charm of this Genoese series, anticipating his work at the Caroline court by eight years, has never been surpassed, from its beginnings with the portraits of Filippo Cattaneo and Clelia Cattaneo (both late 1623; Washington, DC, N.G.A.) to the Three Sons of Girolamo de’ Franchi (the ‘Balbi Children’, 1625–6; London, N.G.) to the much later portrait of Mary, Princess Royal (1637; ex-Governor Fuller priv. col., Boston, MA), which in 1647 was sent clandestinely to Holland by Charles I when he was detained at Hampton Court.

Van Dyck then moved to Palermo in spring 1624 at the invitation of the Viceroy of Sicily, Emanuel-Philibert of Savoy (1588–1624). Towards mid-May the plague struck, and the city was soon in quarantine. With the discovery of St Rosalia’s purported remains in a grotto on nearby Monte Pellegrino, her cult expanded; and van Dyck executed at least three commissions to represent her as an intercessor (New York, Met.; London, Apsley House; Ponce, Mus. A.). The plague also claimed the life of the Viceroy himself, on 3 August of that year, shortly after van Dyck painted a scintillating three-quarter-length portrait of him (1624; London, Dulwich Pict. Gal.). On 12 July the 25-year-old van Dyck visited the Italian artist Sofonisba Anguissola, then in her nineties. In his Italian Sketchbook he surrounded a drawing of this relict (fol. 110r) with notes of their conversation about portraiture. He was also commissioned to paint a large altarpiece, the Madonna of the Rosary, for the oratory of the Rosario (1624–7; in situ). This, his principal religious undertaking in Italy, he began but did not complete before he prudently withdrew to Genoa from a recrudescence of the plague. (After his return to Antwerp, his representative, Antonio della Torre, was paid by the Confraternity of the Rosary on 8 April 1628 for the altarpiece, ‘novamente fatto nella città di Genova’.) From van Dyck’s pen sketch of the composition (Hilversum, Liberna priv. col., see 1991 exh. cat., no. 45) it is evident that he had in mind Rubens’s Madonna della Vallicella Adored by Saints (1606–7; Grenoble, Mus. Grenoble), the first version of the altarpiece that Rubens himself had rejected for the Chiesa Nuova in Rome; he knew it as it hung over Rubens’s mother’s tomb in the abbey of St Michael, Antwerp, where his own younger brother Theodoor held a canonry.

In July 1625 van Dyck reputedly made an excursion to Marseille in order to visit, at Aix-en-Provence or Belgentier, the savant who had become the admiring friend and correspondent of Rubens, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc. If so, van Dyck is likely to have drawn his portrait. A likeness was eventually engraved in Antwerp for The Iconography (m.-h. 89). On his return from Provence, he exulted in painting a dazzling series of portraits, many full-length, of men, women and children of the leading Genoese families (e.g. Genoese Noblewoman and her Son, c. 1626; Washington, DC, N.G.A.). His siblings had to declare to the Antwerp magistrate on 12 December 1625, as his brother-in-law had done on 27 November 1624, that he was still abroad.

3. Antwerp and The Hague, autumn 1627–spring 1632.

Van Dyck returned home in evident haste in autumn 1627 for family as well as professional reasons. His parting gift to his hosts in Genoa, the double portrait of Cornelis and Lucas de Wael (Rome, Mus. Capitolino), is in parts conspicuously unfinished. His sister Cornelia, a Béguine, died in Antwerp on 18 September. Payment was made on 18 December by Giovanni Francesco di Antonio Brignole to ‘Antonio Fiamengo’ for the full-length portraits (all Genoa, Gal. Pal. Rosso) of his son Anton Giulio Brignole-Sale on Horseback, of Paola Adorno, Anton Giulio’s wife, and of Geronima Brignole-Sale with her Daughter Aurelia, Giovanni Francesco’s wife and daughter. Van Dyck’s first dated portraits on return to Antwerp were three-quarter-lengths of appropriately rich sobriety but without palatial settings: that of the collector and connoisseur Peeter Stevens of 1627 and that of Anna Wake of 1628, the year Stevens took her as his wife (both The Hague, Mauritshuis). He painted also in 1628 his first major altarpiece for an Antwerp church, the St Augustine in Ecstasy, which was commissioned by Marius Jansenius for the left aisle of the church of St Augustine, flanking a vast Sacra Conversazione by Rubens and counterbalancing on the right the altarpiece of similar dimensions to his own, the Martyrdom of St Apollonia by Jacob Jordaens (all 1628; Antwerp, St Augustine; on loan to Kon. Mus. S. Kst.). Van Dyck and Jordaens were paid alike, 600 florins, establishing their status as the leading painters after Rubens in their city.

Van Dyck had made a will in Brussels on 6 March 1628. On 27 May the Earl of Carlisle wrote to Buckingham from Brussels that he had not met Rubens at his home in Antwerp but had met him the following day at ‘Monsr Van-digs’. At the Maison Professe in Antwerp, van Dyck was enrolled that same month in the Sodalitedt van de Bejaerde Jongmans, a Jesuit confraternity of bachelors. (He was to paint in 1629 for these devout bachelors the grand altarpiece of the Virgin and Child with SS Rosalia, Peter and Paul, redolent of his experience in Venice and Bologna, and in 1630 a smaller, more intimate and more distinctly personal work of devotion, the Mystic Vision of the Blessed Herman Joseph (both Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.).) In December 1628 he was presented with a gold chain, valued at 750 guilders, for a portrait of the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia (version, Turin, Gal. Sabauda), whose court painter, Rubens, was in Madrid on a diplomatic mission to her nephew Philip IV of Spain.

Van Dyck’s eye was already on Rubens’s eventual return to dominate painting in Antwerp and correspondingly on his own chances of a return to the Stuart court, where Charles I, a truly art-loving prince, had succeeded his father James in 1625. As his spectacular introduction to the new reign, van Dyck painted his most delectable masterpiece hitherto on a profane subject, the gorgeous Rinaldo and Armida (see fig.; for a later modello on the same theme see [not available online]), and on 5 December 1629 he wrote to Endymion Porter, whom he had met nine years earlier through Buckingham, that the painting had been passed to his agent for delivery to the King; the following March van Dyck received £72 for it. By then he had more than sufficient financial security; and on 20 March 1630, Antwerp having issued a loan of 100,000 guilders, he subscribed for 4800 guilders. In a proxy dated 27 May, written for Pieter Snayers, who was to figure among the painters whose likeness (Munich, Alte Pin.) was engraved for The Iconography (m.-h. 98), van Dyck described himself as ‘schilder van Heure Hoocheyd’ (‘painter to Her Majesty’), the Infanta Isabella. His annual salary was 250 guilders; and, like Rubens before him, he was excused residence at her court in Brussels, continuing to live in the artistic centre Antwerp. In December an Antwerp restorer, J.-B. Bruno, chanced to remark on van Dyck’s exquisite collection of paintings (see Wood; Brown and Ramsay).

On 10 May 1631 van Dyck stood godfather for Antonia, daughter of Lucas Vorsterman the elder (who, with his star pupil Paulus Pontius and with Schelte Bolswert, was to be one of the chief engravers of The Iconography; for van Dyck’s own etched portrait of Vorsterman see [not available online]). During 1631, at the acme of his powers, van Dyck painted the stupendous full-length portrait of Marie de Raet, the wife of Philippe Le Roy, whose own full-length portrait dates from the previous year (both London, Wallace). From 4 September to 16 October 1631 Maria de’ Medici, exiled from France with her younger son, Gaston, Duc d’Orléans, was in Antwerp, and van Dyck painted their portraits full-length (Bordeaux, Mus. B.-A., and Chantilly, Mus. Condé, respectively). The Queen Mother’s secretary, J. P. de La Serre, noted in his travel record his admiration for van Dyck’s ‘Cabinet de Titien’. Titian, almost from van Dyck’s first sightseeing tours south of the Alps, had largely supplanted Veronese in his utmost admiration, as is evident from his altarpiece of the Crucifixion with SS Francis and Bernardino and a Donor (c. 1620) for the parish church of S Michele di Pagana, near Rapallo in Liguria (in situ). His Italian Sketchbook is crammed with ricordi penned from Titian’s portraits and compositions. Among the nineteen works of Titian that he owned (he copied four more) were the Perseus and Andromeda (c. 1555; London, Wallace) and the Vendramin Family (c. 1543–7; London, N.G.), in which the boys seated on the altar steps with their pet dog surely prompted the purely domestic group of the Children of Agostino and Vittoria Spinola (c. 1623–5; Genoa, Pal. Durazzo-Pallavicini), itself long acclaimed as a foretaste of the Children of Charles I and Henrietta Maria (1635; Windsor Castle, Berks, Royal Col.).

Between 6 and 16 December 1631 Sir Balthazar Gerbier, the British agent in Brussels who had been Buckingham’s master of the horse, sent Charles I’s treasurer, Lord Weston, van Dyck’s Virgin and Child with St Catherine (London, Buckingham Pal., Royal Col.) as a New Year’s gift to the King. Perhaps out of pique at this high-handed transaction, van Dyck himself wrote to Geldorp that this painting was but a copy. Gerbier wrote to the King on 13 March 1632 that Rubens considered it an original and that the vendor, Salomon Noveliers, confirmed this before a notary; van Dyck himself was in Brussels, planning to travel to London.

Despite any such intention, the painter went for the winter of 1631–2 northward to The Hague, where he painted subject pictures as well as portraits for both the court of Frederick Henry and Amalia von Solms and the court of the deposed ‘Winter King and Queen’ of Bohemia, Frederick V of the Palatinate and Elizabeth Stuart. For the individual likenesses of the Palatine princelings, he adapted the pattern invented by Titian for his portrait of Benedetto Varchi (c. 1540–43; Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.). He portrayed in addition the poet and statesman Constantijn Huygens the elder, who entered in his diary for 28 January 1632, ‘Pingor a Van Dyckio …’. The appearance of the portrait (untraced) is presumably recorded in Pontius’s engraving in The Iconography (m.-h. 53), the series of engravings for which Huygens himself wrote three mottoes.

4. England, spring 1632–late 1633 or early 1634.

Not until April 1632 was van Dyck in London again. From that time Edward Norgate, an artist and writer in the service of Arundel and brother-in-law of Nicholas Lanier, the court musician who had presented his own portrait by van Dyck (1628; Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.) to the King, had 15 shillings per diem ‘for dyett and lodging’ of van Dyck. The Flemish painter moved soon to Blackfriars, London, beyond the jurisdiction of the jealous Painter-Stainers’ Company. He also had lodgings at Eltham in Kent, where the King kept his summer residence. On 5 July 1632 he was knighted and made ‘principalle Paynter in ordinary to their Majesties’, thus eclipsing Daniel Mijtens who had been portrait painter to the Stuart court since 1625. His ‘greate Peece’ displaying the royal family settled at home (1632; London, Buckingham Pal., Royal Col.), to be hung at a vantage-point in the Long Gallery at Whitehall, was decorously more staid, it must be said, than the vivid grouping of The Lomellini Family , which he had finished in Genoa. In the still greater, but now so sadly damaged, group portrait of Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke, and his Family (c. 1633–4; Wilton House, Wilts), van Dyck, in dealing with so many individual figures, would seem to have overextended his powers of coherent composition in depth. More compact, more coherent and effective in grouping and panoply is the portrait of Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen and his Family (1634; Firle Place, E. Sussex), in which the count and the countess are shown seated with their four children standing beside them.

Van Dyck was kept busy on portraiture and on the restoration (in one case the replacement) of Titian’s series of Twelve Roman Emperors (1536–40; destr. 1734), purchased by Charles I from Mantua. Ten commissions from the King were paid at £280 on 8 August 1632, and on 7 May 1633 nine portraits of the King and Queen at £444; in April 1633 he had, in addition, received the gold chain and medal that he is later seen wearing in the enigmatic Self-portrait with a Sunflower (c. 1635–6; best-known, but doubtfully autograph version, London, Duke of Westminster priv. col.); and on 17 October 1633 he was promised a salary of £200 a year, besides payment for special work. A few days later he had a £40 advance for a portrait of the Queen. During 1632 he had painted the half-length of Henrietta Maria Handing Charles I a Laurel Wreath (Kroměříž Castle), an eloquent criticism of Mijtens’s effort at the same courtly composition (before 1632, overpainted 1634; London, Buckingham Pal., Royal Col.); also the portrait of Philip, 4th Lord Wharton (Washington, DC, N.G.A.). In a census of foreign residents at Blackfriars, he was described as ‘Dutch. Sir Anthony Van Dike. Portrait painter. Two years. Six servants’.

5. Antwerp and Brussels, early 1634–early 1635.

Henrietta Maria in the last week of August 1633 had tried to place Theodoor van Dyck, Anthony’s younger brother, as her chaplain. The canon can only have stayed a little while in London; by 14 March 1634 he was back in Antwerp. On private business thither the painter had perhaps even preceded him, for on 28 March he acquired an interest in Het Steen at Elewijt, the estate that Rubens was to buy in May 1635. On 14 April Anthony authorized his sister in Brussels to administer his property. At this point he had little intention of settling to enjoy country life. He was elected on 18 October dean of the Antwerp Guild of St Luke honoris causa, an honour previously vouchsafed only to Rubens. He painted a noble version of the Pietà (Munich, Alte Pin.). Then on 4 November, the Infanta Isabella having died in Brussels the previous December, Philip IV’s brother, the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, made his entry into Brussels as the new governor for Spain. The three-quarter-length portrait of him (Madrid, Prado) by van Dyck is noted on 16 December as ‘recently painted’, the painter being then lodged in Brussels in the house ‘In’t Paradijs’ behind the town hall. During this 12-month stay in Flanders, he painted some of the most impressive male portraits of his career: that of his friend Jacomo de Cachiopin (Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.), an inheritor of mercantile wealth who devoted a whole room in the country house he built for himself to portraits by van Dyck, including those of himself and his wife (untraced); a full-length of ineffable elegance, the Abbé Cesare Alessandro Scaglia (Hackwood Park, Hants), the worldly wise, world weary envoy of Savoy, who had returned jobless to Brussels; and two superb equestrian portraits, one of the Spanish general, the Marqués Francesco de Moncada (Paris, Louvre), the other of Prince Thomas-Francis of Savoy-Carignan (Turin, Gal. Sabauda), who had served as temporary governor for Spain between the death of the Archduchess and the arrival in the Netherlands of the Cardinal-Infante. The portrait of Cachiopin is one of the most penetrating studies of a highly civilized melancholic. It contrasts with a more public appearance calculated by van Dyck in his chalk and wash study to be etched by Vorsterman for The Iconography (m.-h. 75). In the portrait of Moncada van Dyck emulated in flattering the rider the revolutionary pattern invented by Rubens for the equestrian portrait of the Duque de Lerma in Spain (1603; Madrid, Prado), known to the painter through Rubens’s preparatory drawing (Paris, Louvre); a pattern that had guided van Dyck in Genoa for the Anton Giulio Brignole-Sale on Horseback, and which he was to elaborate in the stupendous Charles I with M. de St Antoine (1633; London, Buckingham Pal., Royal Col.). The magnificent conceit of showing Prince Thomas-Francis executing a levada on a wild and rocky eminence was to excite Bernini in his equestrian monument in marble, Constantine the Great (1654–70; Rome, Vatican, Scala Regia), as well as in his ill-fated equestrian statue of Louis XIV (1669–77; subsequently modified into a Marcus Curtius by Girardon; Versailles, Château, Gardens). Whence else came to Urban VIII’s sculptor the crucial idea of a broad cascade of drapery set aslant to show off the Roman Emperor on his rearing horse? Van Dyck in this vision of command was surely matching himself against Rubens’s equestrian portrait of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham as Lord High Admiral (1625; ex-Osterley Park House, NT, London; destr. 1949).

It is not only in comparison to these public and private triumphs in male portraiture that the portrait of Princess Henrietta of Lorraine (1634; London, Kenwood House), painted in Antwerp with her negro page, seems tame. The relaxation of van Dyck’s imaginative creativity over the preceding decade is clear when this picture is compared to the portrait painted 11 years earlier of the Marchesa Elena Grimaldi Cattaneo (see fig. above) gliding so regally on to an evocation of a noble terrace at Sampierdarena, her complexion protected by a parasol held over her head by her negro page.

6. England, spring 1635–late 1639.

Some sitters, particularly in England, evidently did not fully engage van Dyck’s interest. Yet to England he returned in spring 1635 in the fullness of his powers to paint the portrait of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury (c. 1635–7; Cambridge, Fitzwilliam), the only English prelate who could afford his price for a three-quarter-length. For the Stuarts he had to meet the challenge of depicting the Head of Charles I in Three Positions (1635–6; Windsor Castle, Berks, Royal Col.), as a guide for Bernini in Rome to carve a marble bust, and by July the Three Eldest Children of Charles I and Henrietta Maria for Christina of Savoy in Turin. The triple study of the King’s head, inspired in presentation by Lorenzo Lotto’s Portrait of a Jeweller in Three Positions (c. 1530–35; Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.), then believed to have been painted by Titian, caused Bernini to remark, it is reported, on ‘ce visage funeste’; and the sculptor was understandably reluctant when four years later Henrietta Maria wrote to request a bust of herself in the manner of the portrait van Dyck had essayed of her husband. She promised to send models painted by van Dyck (Memphis, TN, Brooks Mus. A.; London, Buckingham Pal., Royal Col.). The Three Eldest Children was commissioned by her for her elder sister in Turin in grateful exchange for portraits of the little Prince and Princess of Savoy. When van Dyck’s picture was ready in the autumn, the Savoyard ambassador in London had to write to his Duke that the Queen had told him that: ‘The King was angry with the painter Vendec for not having put smocks on them, as is the custom with small children, and that she should ask Madame, her sister, to have them painted in’. The King may have felt shame to have his heir depicted as an infant of five and a half not yet breeched. Nonetheless van Dyck continued as his principal painter, and on 23 February 1637 he was paid £1200 by Charles I ‘for Certaine pictures by him delivered for our use’.

It was the year after his return to London that van Dyck completed on Scaglia’s commission the last and most deeply moving of his religious works, the Lamentation (c. 1636; Antwerp, Kon. Mus. S. Kst.), for a chapel of the Antwerp Recollects. Meanwhile the long-term project to which van Dyck attached particular importance, The Iconography, was going ahead; and he wrote on 14 August 1636 to Franciscus Junius, librarian to Lord Arundel, for an appropriately learned tag to inscribe below the portrait of Kenelm Digby (m.-h. 71), engraved by Robert van Voerst (1593–1636). At the same time van Dyck, like Rubens, praised highly Junius’s new treatise De pictura veterum (Amsterdam, 1637).

Highlights of van Dyck’s painted production in the later 1630s were the portrait of two brothers-in-law seated, Thomas Killigrew and William, Lord Crofts (1638; London, Buckingham Pal., Royal Col.), a painting in which he again used the symbolism of the broken column (of fortitude in mourning) as he had done in the Self-portrait of early 1623; and, perhaps a little earlier, the haunting three-quarter-length of a man wracked by anxiety, who has usually and most likely been identified as Sir Thomas Chaloner (c. 1637; St Petersburg, Hermitage). Chaloner was to be among the parliamentary judges who condemned the King to death. By contrast to these sensitive portrayals of shared grief or inner tension, he painted in the same phase the portrait of François Langlois, the engraver, publisher and fellow art dealer, dressed as a Savoyard, fingering a musette (c. 1637–8; Cowdray Park, W. Sussex). This was not only an instance, rare since van Dyck’s Italian years, in which he felt called to convey an instantaneous impression of activity, particularly in the face and hands—indeed for that reason this portrait of ‘Ciartes’ (Langlois’s nickname, derived from his birthplace, Chartres) has sometimes been backdated to those years—but also within its Baroque form it was a startlingly dégagé image. Van Dyck also developed in England a pastoral mode of presentation for the pose, dress and setting of select sitters. His successes in this vein were the portraits of Olivia Porter (c. 1637; London, Syon House, priv. col.), wife of his friend Endymion; the earlier Philip, 4th Lord Wharton (Washington, DC, N.G.A.) aged about 19; and Lord George Stuart (c. 1638; London, N.P.G.). For those no longer in the bloom of youth, he enhanced the formal grandeur of rich clothes and hangings. A prime example is another earlier portrait, that of Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick (1634; New York, Met.) standing in court attire on the foreshore, the splendour of his stance and person set off by the rocky cliffs, while the navy that he commanded battles in the distance. This glorification consciously outclasses the more staid full-length of the same personage painted two years earlier by Mijtens (1632; London, N. Mar. Mus.). Another example is the double portrait of the Earl of Arundel and his wife, Aletheia Talbot, known as the Madagascar Portrait (1639; London, N.P.G., on dep. Arundel Castle, W. Sussex). The richly dressed Earl and Countess point to Madagascar on a large globe, alluding to a scheme for colonizing the island in which the Earl was then involved.

A memorandum (?of late 1638) by van Dyck to Charles I lists prices for twenty-five paintings not yet paid for as well as five years’ arrears in his £200 salary. He was paid £1603 on 14 December 1638 and £305 on 25 February 1639. The valuation of 14 of the paintings was reduced by the King, who, since van Dyck’s return from Flanders, had been short of revenue. Van Dyck had served his prince not only with two beguiling portrait groups of the royal infants, one of which had vexed his employer, and the study of his head in three positions but also with portraits of Charles I Armoured as a Christian Knight and Charles I in Garter Robes (1636; Windsor Castle, Berks, Royal Col.), as well as with numerous portraits of the Queen, including the enchanting earlier full-length of her in hunting costume with her dwarf Sir Jeffrey Hudson standing at her side (1633; Washington, DC, N.G.A.). But it is perhaps the portrait of the King in hunting costume, Le Roi à la chasse (c. 1635; Paris, Louvre), that represents van Dyck’s supreme tribute to his royal patron.

Anthony van Dyck: Le Roi à la chasse, oil on canvas, 2.75×2.14 m, 1635 (Paris, Musée du Louvre); photo credit: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

7. Final years, 1640–41.

That the King seemed insufficiently grateful and a slow payer was presumably one element in van Dyck’s resolve to leave London, reported early in 1640 by the Countess of Sussex to Ralph Verney. His marriage the previous year to Mary Ruthven, one of the Queen’s ladies, offered him a position in English society that his long association with Margaret Lemon, a tempestuous enchantress, had not. Yet the dawning prospect in his native city that he might succeed Rubens, who was overburdened with commissions and mortally sick with gout, would have been a major element in his calculation. There was, however, a delay from 30 May, when Rubens died in Antwerp, until 23 September, when, once more from Arundel, a pass was obtained for Sir Anthony and Lady van Dyck to visit the Continent. Ten days later the Cardinal-Infante wrote from Ghent to Philip IV that van Dyck was expected on 18 October at the dinner of the Guild of St Luke in Antwerp. Ferdinand wrote again to his brother on 10 November that van Dyck’s pride would not allow him to undertake to complete Rubens’s unfinished paintings for the Torre de la Parada, although he would accept a fresh commission. It is not known what work he chose to do in Flanders in 1640. Probably the last commission executed in London was for the widowed Earl of Southampton, the allegorical portrait of his wife, Rachel de Ruvigny, Countess of Southampton (c. 1638–40; Cambridge, Fitzwilliam), ‘la belle et vertueuse Huguenotte’, triumphant over death. About that Bellori wrote, not quite accurately on the evidence of Kenelm Digby, that she was portrayed as Fortuna. He also executed a portrait of Inigo Jones (c. 1640; see [not available online]).

Van Dyck, having been frustrated two years earlier in his hopes of realizing through the costliest medium of tapestry a grand design to clad annually on St George’s Day the walls of the Banqueting House at Whitehall with four large tapestries of Charles I and the Garter Knights in Procession (the project advanced only so far as a swift chiaroscuro oil sketch; Belvoir Castle, Leics), turned his attention to the commission for history paintings to adorn the Grande Galerie of the Louvre. In hopes of that, he went to Paris at the beginning of December 1640. Evidently he visited the Palais du Luxembourg; and there rapidly in pen and wash, mingling with characteristic wit serious purpose, the made a copy (England, priv. col.), so as to stretch his own compositional sense to an unaccustomed scale, of Rubens’s Betrothal of Maria de’ Medici and Henry IV (c. 1621–5; Paris, Louvre). Despite this sally, Louis XIII summoned, quite unsuitably, Poussin from Italy to execute that coveted commission.

After this second disappointment, van Dyck returned to London to paint a wedding portrait, presumably his last royal portrait, of Princess Mary and William II of Orange Nassau (Amsterdam, Rijksmus.); the children married on 12 May 1641. On 13 August Lady Roxburghe wrote from Richmond to Count John Wolfert van Brederode at The Hague that van Dyck had recovered from a long illness; in ten to twelve days he would bring the promised painting to Holland on his way to Flanders. In October he was reported again in Antwerp, then on 16 November again in Paris. By then he was so ill that he had to postpone portraying ‘Monseigneur le Cardinal’ [Richelieu]; and he requested a pass to England. His wife was pregnant; and on 1 December their daughter Justiniana was born in London. Three days later he revised his will, providing not only for his legitimate family but also for his natural daughter, Maria Teresa. On 9 December he died in his house at Blackfriars. It was Jordaens who succeeded to the primacy of Rubens at Antwerp.

1. Artistic.

The enthusiasm of van Dyck for Venetian portraits, especially those by Titian, witnessed in the Italian Sketchbook not only by ricordi but by the additional list on the last leaf of those known to van Dyck, can hardly be exaggerated. Titian’s double portrait of ‘the French ambassador enditing’ (Monsignor Georges d’Armagnac and his Secretary, late 1530s; Alnwick Castle, Northumb.) was known to him after it had been appropriated by the Earl of Northumberland from the collection of the murdered Buckingham: that picture and knowledge of another then also in England, Sebastiano del Piombo’s portrait of Cardinal Ferry Carondelet and Two Companions (c. 1512; Madrid, Mus. Thyssen-Bornemizza), undoubtedly inspired van Dyck’s portrait of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford Dictating to Sir Philip Mainwaring (1640; St Osyth Priory, Essex); and the close recession of columns in the picture by Sebastiano inspired the setting of the portrait of Albertus Miraeus (c. 1626–32; Woburn Abbey, Beds). The portrait of Strafford, depicted on the eve of his departure for Ireland, standing full-length in armour, a bâton in his left hand and an Irish wolfhound under his right, was a patent tribute to Titian’s portrait of Charles V with his Hunting Dog (?1532; Madrid, Prado) with an imperial hand resting on his faithful white hound. Van Dyck rarely essayed narrative in portraiture: but when he did, as in the George Gage Being Offered a Marble Statue by a Roman Dealer and his Assistant (1622–3; London, N.G.), his genius took fire from Titian’s portrait of Pope Paul III with his Grandsons (1546; Naples, Capodimonte), of which he had penned a ricordo in his Italian Sketchbook (fol. 108r).

This abounding love for Titian should not allow van Dyck’s admiration for Raphael to be overlooked: for the double portraits of Andrea Navagero and Agostino Beazzano (before April 1516; Rome, Gal. Doria-Pamphili) and Raphael and his Fencing-master (c. 1518; Paris, Louvre); for the presumed Self-portrait (c. 1513–14; ex-Czartoryski Col., Kraków), which he recorded in the Italian Sketchbook (fol. 109v); and for the portrait of Bindo Altoviti (c. 1518; Washington, DC, N.G.A.). Those double portraits were not far from the forefront of van Dyck’s mind when he painted the double portrait of Thomas Killigrew and Lord Crofts and ten years earlier that of Cornelis and Lucas de Wael. A reverberation of Raphael’s dandified Self-portrait in a furred gown is to be found in van Dyck’s Self-portrait with the Broken Column; and in the oval portrait of Sir Endymion Porter and Van Dyck (c. 1635; Madrid, Prado), the painter posed himself as Altoviti.

Of contemporary painters, Rubens apart, Guido Reni became the crucially important influence on van Dyck. This developed beyond any actual meeting in Bologna and his years south of the Alps; the pen sketch (Madrid, Real Acad. S Fernando) is not a self-portrait of Reni, but a hasty impression by van Dyck. Before abandoning Genoa, van Dyck had studied Reni’s Assumption of the Virgin in the Jesuit church of S Ambrogio (1617; in situ), and memories of that mighty altarpiece mingled with those of Rubens’s treatment of the theme in an oil sketch (Vienna, Akad. Bild. Kst.) painted within a few years of his return to Antwerp. The Mystic Marriage of St Catherine (1630; London, Buckingham Pal., Royal Col.) shows not only an addiction to Titian’s gusto in composition but also a refinement of sentiment, expressed both in silvery tone and in morphology, that evinces a lasting attraction to Reni. Whereas the Virgin and Child with SS Rosalie, Peter and Paul (1629; Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.) owes much of its grand conception to a composition by Titian of the Virgin and Child with a Donor (untraced), noted by van Dyck in his Italian Sketchbook (fol. 28v), the core appears, when reduced in scale and modified to the contemporary Vision of St Anthony (1629; Milan, Brera), to be of Reni’s mode of refinement of types and sensibility to illumination. That this affinity with Reni was deep rooted is shown nowhere better than in the three-quarter-length portrait of Nicholas Lanier (1628; Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.). The Reni-like quality of the finished portrait, the work of a week, emanates from a preparatory drawing in black and white chalk (Edinburgh, N.G.), which in its agitation of rippling light on the ridges and slower movement of shadow in the hollows of drapery so vividly recalls Reni’s drawings for the ‘gran’ Madonna dei Signori Marchesi Tanari’ in Bologna (i.e. the Virgin and Child with St John or ‘Madonna Tanari’, 1627–8; untraced). A paradigm of van Dyck’s eclectic progress as a draughtsman in chalks in less than 15 years is the comparison of the advancing Head and Front Quarters of a Grey Horse (c. 1618–21; Chatsworth, Derbys), studied for St Martin Dividing his Cloak with a Beggar (versions at Zaventem, St Martin, and Windsor Castle, Berks, Royal Col.) in the boldly plastic manner that he had learnt in Antwerp from Rubens, himself incarnate with the spirit of Annibale Carracci, and the Studies of a Greyhound (c. 1633; London, BM), seated but quivering with nervous mobility, studied as a companion to the sitter in the portrait of James Stuart, 4th Duke of Lennox (c. 1633; New York, Met.), with Reni-like vibrancy of surface.

2. Literary and Classical.

Van Dyck retained the Latin of an educated bourgeois. He was able to comment on the De pictura veterum of Francis Junius. In the ex-voto painted in memory of his father, the Crucifixion with SS Dominic and Catherine of Siena (see fig. above), his inscription and funeral device alluded in ‘ne patris svi manibus …’ to the manes, the spirit of the departed. However, as Roger de Piles perceived, he was less minded to be a scholar than Rubens. His interest in antiquity was slighter and evanescent. He drew a fragment of a Niobid frieze (Paris, Fond. Custodia, Inst. Néer.); he included one of the Arundel marbles, a bas-relief from Smyrna (London, Mus. London), in his Continence of Scipio for Buckingham; besides his conspicuous placing of a wine ewer with an ithyphallic satyr for a handle in the early Samson and Delilah (1619–20; London, Dulwich Pict. Gal.), which was intended to rival Rubens’s treatment of that subject for Nicolaas Rockox (c. 1609–10; London, N.G.), he also incorporated knowledge of the Belvedere Torso (Rome, Vatican, Mus. Pio-Clementino) and the Borghese Hermaphrodite (Paris, Louvre); and he drew in his Italian Sketchbook (fol. 33v) the statue (Paris, Louvre) believed to be of the ancient Cynic philosopher Diogenes. Moreover, he was sufficiently familiar, doubtless through contact with Rubens, with Otto van Veen’s Amorum emblemata (Antwerp, 1608), witness his Time Clipping Cupid’s Wings (1630–32; Paris, Mus. Jacquemart-André); with Virgil’s Aeneid, witness his Venus at the Forge of Vulcan (1630–32; Paris, Louvre); with Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1580–81), witness his Rinaldo and Armida (1629); with Guarini’s Il pastor fido (1589), witness his Amaryllis and Myrtillo (1631–2; Pommersfelden, Schloss Weissenstein); as well as with the common literary stock of painters, Ovid, the Vulgate and the Lives of the Saints. To the end of his life he kept up with Jesuit writings, the frontispiece to a recent publication being as essential an ingredient in his conception of the painted memorial to Rachel de Ruvigny as was Rubens’s Jupiter (c. 1618; Strasbourg, Mus. B.-A.). In portraits he essayed emblem and allegory rarely. After his contact with Agostino Pallavicini in Genoa, it was not until his association with Sir Kenelm Digby in London that he was fully engaged by learned, posthumous allusions to Rachel de Ruvigny, triumphant over death, and by those contrived by Sir Kenelm for the allegorical portrait of his wife, Venetia Stanley, Lady Digby as Prudence (1633; London, N.P.G.), which were based on Juvenal. The pretty fancies of the adolescent Lady Mary Villiers with Lord Arran as Cupid (c. 1636; Raleigh, NC Mus. A.) and Mary, Duchess of Lennox as St Agnes (1637; Windsor Castle, Berks, Royal Col.) strike no deep chords.