In Some Anecdotes of Painting in England(1762) Horace Walpole noted that Anthony Van Dyck’s works are so frequent in England that to most Englishmen it is difficult to avoid thinking of him as their countryman. The history of painting in England during the seventeenth century was very largely the creation of foreign artists, particularly from the Low Countries, who either came on short visits or for various reasons took up residence there. Portraiture, that essential accompaniment to the life of a court, was very largely served by foreigners, primarily by Anthony van Dyck and Daniel Mytens before the Civil War, and by Peter Lely and Godfrey Kneller after the Restoration - with the result that the English image of the Stuart kings is very largely their creation.
The Van Dyck and Britain exhibition (18 February–17 May 2009, Tate Britain) billboards Sir Anthony van Dyck, who was born and trained in the major art centre of Antwerp, as ‘the greatest painter in seventeenth-century Britain’. According to the press release this exhibition will reveal the Flemish artist's unique impact on British cultural life, from the reign of Charles I onwards, and will bring together some of the finest and most magnificent paintings that Van Dyck produced during his years in Britain, ‘examining his innovative approach to painting the British elite – a creative synthesis of his Antwerp baroque training and his intensive study of Italian, and especially Venetian, painting’. It will also demonstrate his continuing visual legacy through ‘van Dyckian’ portraits by artists from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, including Sir Joshua Reynolds and John Singer Sargent.
Highlights will include royal portraits such as 'The Great Piece' – Charles I and Henrietta Maria and their two eldest children 1632, Charles I on Horseback with M. de St Antoine 1633 (both from The Royal Collection), full-length portraits such as Lucy Percy, Countess of Carlisle 1637 (Private Collection), the beautiful and rarely exhibited late Self-portrait c.1640 (Private Collection), and van Dyck's so-called friendship portraits such as Mountjoy Blount, 1st Earl of Newport and George, Lord Goring c.1639 (National Trust, Petworth).
Anthony Van Dyck, Charles I on Horseback with M de St Antoine (1633). Royal Collection.
What’s especially striking about Van Dyck is his thorough and immediate identification with local tastes and exigencies, which made him an immensely popular painter at the art-enthusiastic court of King Charles I. Refined in nature he effortlessly injected the English sense of beauty and style into his own artistic sensibility. No wonder then that Christopher Brown wrote in the yearbook The Low Countries that Van Dyck brought the revolution in portrait painting from medieval icon to modern portrait, begun by his Low Countries predecessors at the English court, to a triumphant conclusion in England.
A naturally gifted painter indeed, who even became a household name in a number of divergent fields. Not only is the oil paint pigment ‘van Dyck brown’ (‘Van dyke brown’ being an early photographic printing process using the same colour) named after him, Van Dyck was also known for painting portraits of people having short, pointed beards, and that's why this particular kind of facial fad – a variation of a goatee with a mustache – was dubbed a ‘vandyke’ later on (probably first in America in the 19th century).
The ‘vandyke’, preferably dressed with pomade or wax, applied with a tiny brush and comb
Subscribe