Anthony van Dyck

Biography

In Rome in 1622 a young Fleming went about with servants. He wore silk, a hat with feathers and gold chains across his chest, kept his distance from the colony of northern artists and their drinking bouts, and they mockingly called him the “little cavalier of painting”. That is how Bellori, his first biographer, describes him, and the description, to my mind, is accurate: Van Dyck spent a third of his life outside Flanders, at courts, and died as court painter to the king of England.

He was then in his twenty-fourth year.

He was born in Antwerp on 22 March 1599, the seventh of twelve children of Frans van Dyck, a wealthy silk merchant; the next day he was baptised in the Church of Our Lady. His mother died when the boy was eight. At ten he was placed in the workshop of Hendrick van Balen, a painter of small cabinet pictures on mythological subjects; how long he stayed there is not known, two years or four. The self-portrait of 1613–1614 was painted at fifteen, and it is the hand of an assured master. Around 1615, without waiting for the rank of master, he set up his own workshop (his father by then was in financial trouble, and money was needed), and soon afterwards he was admitted to the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke as a free master.

Then came Rubens. By 1618 Van Dyck was his chief assistant; in the 1620 contract for the ceilings of the Jesuit church in Antwerp he is named among the “disciples” who were to execute the paintings to the master’s designs. Rubens himself called his nineteen-year-old assistant the best of his pupils. While Rubens was away, Van Dyck painted his first wife, Isabella Brant, and it is one of the liveliest of his early portraits.

In the autumn of 1620, at the urging of the Marquess of Buckingham, he went to London, worked for James I, received a hundred pounds, and in the Earl of Arundel’s collection saw Titian for the first time. A few months later he returned to Flanders, and at the end of 1621 he left for Italy with money and letters of recommendation from Rubens; by 20 November he was already in Genoa. The six Italian years were spent on the move: Rome, Florence, Bologna, Parma with its frescoes by Correggio, Venice, where he at last had his fill of Titian and Veronese, Mantua. In 1624 the Viceroy of Sicily summoned him to Palermo to paint his portrait; there the plague caught up with Van Dyck, and in quarantine he painted a series of pictures of Saint Rosalia, the city’s patron: a young woman with loose fair hair, in a Franciscan cowl, bending down towards the stricken Palermo. The main outcome of Italy, though, was Genoa. For its nobility, living through its last prosperous years, he worked out the full-length portrait, drawing on Veronese, Titian and Rubens’s own Genoese pictures: very tall figures look down on the viewer from above.

In 1627 he returned to Antwerp and for five years painted Flemish patrons, large altarpieces and portraits, now gentler in tone. By 1630 he is described as court painter to the Archduchess Isabella, governor of the Netherlands. In these same years the “Iconography” was begun, a series of engraved half-length portraits of famous contemporaries, mostly artists. Eighteen of the heads he etched himself, leaving the engravers to finish the figures; portrait etching had scarcely existed before him and in his hands at once reached its highest point. At his death the series numbered eighty plates after his drawings and eighteen of his own; the plates, reworked as they wore out, were printed for centuries, and in 1851 they were bought by the Chalcographie du Louvre.

Charles I had been looking for such a painter since his accession. In 1629, through the agent Endymion Porter, the king bought “Rinaldo and Armida”; in April 1632 Van Dyck arrived in London, in July he was knighted and granted a pension of two hundred pounds as “principal painter in ordinary to their majesties” (the money, admittedly, went unpaid for five years). He was given a house on the Thames at Blackfriars, outside the city boundary and beyond the reach of the painters’ company, and rooms at Eltham Palace. The king and queen came to the studio so often that a special landing stage was built for them; as long as Van Dyck lived, they hardly ever sat for anyone else. Some forty portraits of Charles are counted, thirty of Queen Henrietta Maria, nine of the Earl of Strafford; many were painted in several versions as diplomatic gifts. The triple portrait of the king (1635), full face and in two profiles, was intended for Rome: from it Bernini was to carve a bust. The equestrian portraits of Charles carry on from Titian, while in the Louvre portrait of the king at the hunt, dismounted and leaning carelessly on his cane, power looks like an inborn bearing. The London studio ran almost like a production line: Van Dyck made a drawing on paper, an assistant transferred it to canvas, the master painted the head himself, and the costume, left behind by the sitter, was often finished by specialists in fabrics.

The commission for a cycle on the Order of the Garter for the Banqueting House at Whitehall fell through: by 1638 the king had no money.

In 1634 Van Dyck spent almost a whole year in Antwerp and Brussels, in 1638 he was granted English denizenship, and on 27 February 1640 he married Mary Ruthven, a lady-in-waiting to the queen; the marriage, it is said, was arranged by the king himself to keep the painter in England. After Rubens’s death he was offered the direction of the Antwerp workshop, while he himself travelled to Paris hoping for the decoration of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre and for a portrait of Richelieu. None of this came to anything. In November 1641 he returned from Paris to London, and on 9 December he died at his house in Blackfriars, on the day his newborn daughter Justiniana was baptised. On 11 December he was buried in the choir of St Paul’s Cathedral. The monument erected by the king burned together with the old cathedral in the Great Fire of London in 1666.