Anthony van Dyck

Antoon van Dyck was born in Antwerp on March 22, 1599, the seventh of twelve children of Frans van Dyck, a prosperous silk merchant, and Maria Cuypers, who was known for her fine embroidery ^[1]. Antwerp, then part of the Spanish Netherlands, had lost much of its commercial power after the Dutch revolt closed the Scheldt to shipping, but it remained the artistic capital of the southern provinces, sustained by church commissions and a dense network of workshops.

The boy's talent declared itself early. In 1609, aged ten, he entered the studio of Hendrick van Balen, a respected painter of small cabinet pictures and dean of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke ^[1]. A self portrait painted around 1613 or 1614, when van Dyck was roughly fifteen, already shows a confident, fully formed hand ^[2]. By about 1615 he was operating with a degree of independence unusual for someone his age, working with the young Jan Brueghel and taking on his own pupils even before his formal qualification.

In February 1618 van Dyck was admitted as a free master of the Guild of Saint Luke, still only eighteen ^[1]. His mother had died in 1607, and his father's business later ran into difficulty, circumstances that may help explain the young painter's drive to establish himself quickly and profitably.

The decisive relationship of van Dyck's youth was with Peter Paul Rubens, the dominant figure in northern European painting. By 1618 van Dyck was working in Rubens's Antwerp studio as his most gifted assistant, and Rubens described him around this time as the best of his pupils ^[3]. He collaborated on large commissions, including cartoons for tapestries and altarpieces, absorbing Rubens's fluent handling while developing a nervier, more sensitive touch of his own.

England called first. In late 1620 van Dyck traveled to London, where he received a payment of one hundred pounds from King James I and worked briefly for the great collector Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel ^[2]. The stay lasted only a few months, but it introduced him to the English court and to the Venetian paintings in aristocratic collections that would shape his mature style.

Italy completed his education. From late 1621 until 1627 van Dyck lived mainly in Genoa, with extended stays in Rome, Venice, Palermo, and other cities ^[3]. He filled a sketchbook, now in the British Museum, with studies after Titian, whose color and psychological warmth became lifelong touchstones ^[2]. In Genoa he painted the city's banking aristocracy in full length portraits of extraordinary grandeur: figures in shimmering silks set against columns and crimson drapery, elongated and elevated so that merchants read as princes. In Palermo in 1624 he portrayed the Spanish viceroy Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy and painted images of Saint Rosalia during an outbreak of plague that forced his departure from the city ^[4].

Any account of Anthony van Dyck achievements begins with his transformation of the formal portrait. Returning to Antwerp in 1627, he spent five productive years painting altarpieces and portraits, and in 1630 he was named court painter to the Archduchess Isabella, governor of the Spanish Netherlands ^[1]. His religious pictures of this period, such as works for churches in Antwerp and Ghent, combined Rubensian drama with a gentler, more inward emotional register.

The summit of his career came in England. In 1632 Charles I, the most passionate royal collector of the century, brought van Dyck to London, knighted him, granted him an annual pension of two hundred pounds, and installed him in a house at Blackheath with studio space at Eltham ^[2]. As "principalle Paynter in ordinary to their majesties" he produced the defining images of the Caroline court: Charles on horseback in armor, Charles hunting in a shimmering satin doublet (now in the Louvre), the triple portrait of the king's head made for the sculptor Bernini, and tender group portraits of the royal children ^[5]. These paintings gave the Stuart monarchy its enduring visual identity, an image of graceful, melancholy authority that long outlived the king himself.

Van Dyck also left a major legacy in printmaking. His Iconography, a series of etched and engraved portraits of notable artists, statesmen, and scholars begun around 1630, spread his portrait formulas across Europe; the plates he etched himself are prized for their freedom and economy of line ^[6]. In his final years he pursued, without success, grand decorative commissions for the Banqueting House in Whitehall and for the Louvre in Paris ^[3].

Contemporaries described van Dyck as elegant, ambitious, and fond of fine living. He dressed richly, kept servants and horses, and entertained sitters generously, cultivating the manner of a gentleman rather than a craftsman ^[3]. The pointed beard style he wore and often painted became so associated with him that it is still called a Van Dyke.

For much of the 1630s his companion was Margaret Lemon, his model and mistress in London, whose portrait by him survives ^[2]. In 1639 or early 1640 he married Mary Ruthven, a young gentlewoman in the household of Queen Henrietta Maria and granddaughter of the Earl of Gowrie; the match, reportedly encouraged by the king, tied the painter still more closely to the court ^[1]. In Antwerp, an earlier relationship had produced a daughter, Maria Theresia, whom he acknowledged and provided for in his will.

Van Dyck was a Catholic in Protestant England, a position eased by the queen's own faith and by the tolerant atmosphere of the court. Anthony van Dyck facts often noted by biographers include his prodigious working pace: he commonly scheduled sitters in one hour sessions, worked on several canvases in a day, and relied on assistants for costumes and backgrounds, a studio system that anticipated the practice of later English portraitists ^[5].

The final phase of van Dyck's life unfolded against gathering political crisis. By 1640 Charles I faced rebellion in Scotland and a hostile Parliament, and payments to the artist fell into arrears; a memorandum survives in which van Dyck listed pictures for which he had not been paid ^[2]. The death of Rubens in May 1640 opened the prospect of leadership of the Antwerp school, and van Dyck traveled to Flanders that autumn, where he was received with honor but declined to complete Rubens's unfinished commissions for the Spanish crown on another master's designs ^[3].

In 1641 he moved restlessly between London, Antwerp, and Paris, hoping to win the commission to decorate the Grande Galerie of the Louvre, which ultimately went to Nicolas Poussin's circle ^[3]. His health was failing. He returned to his house at Blackheath in London in November 1641, gravely ill.

On December 1, 1641 his wife Mary gave birth to a daughter, Justiniana. Eight days later, on December 9, 1641, van Dyck died at Blackheath, aged forty two ^[1]. He was buried in Old Saint Paul's Cathedral, where Charles I had an epitaph placed over his tomb; both monument and cathedral were destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666 ^[5].

Few painters have shaped a national tradition as thoroughly as van Dyck shaped English portraiture. Peter Lely, Godfrey Kneller, and above all Thomas Gainsborough worked consciously in his shadow; Gainsborough's Blue Boy is an open homage in Van Dyck costume, and eighteenth century sitters posed in "Van Dyck dress" as a fashionable conceit ^[5]. Joshua Reynolds studied his poses, and the aristocratic full length remained essentially his invention until photography ended the genre.

His influence extended well beyond Britain. The Genoese portraits schooled generations of Italian painters, his religious works informed Flemish art after Rubens, and the Iconography made his likenesses of Europe's cultural elite a standard reference ^[6]. Even a pigment bears his name: Van Dyck brown, a deep transparent earth color he favored.

Today the major collections of his work are held by the Royal Collection, the National Gallery in London, the Prado, the Louvre, and museums in Antwerp, Vienna, Genoa, and Washington ^[4]. For readers of any Anthony van Dyck biography, the essential point is durability: he took the formal portrait, a genre often stiff and documentary, and made it an instrument of psychology, glamour, and myth, and the image of authority he invented for Charles I still colors how the seventeenth century is remembered ^[5].