Anthony van Dyck: The Complete Story
Anthony van Dyck ran his own workshop as a teenager, became the highest paid painter in England, and invented the way aristocrats wanted to be seen for the next 150 years. He was dead at 42, buried in a cathedral that burned.
Rubens called him his best pupil. Charles I gave him a knighthood, a pension, and a house on the Thames. Here is how the silk merchant's son from Antwerp did it.
Anthony van Dyck at a glance:
1599: born in Antwerp, seventh child of a silk merchant; running his own workshop by his late teens.
1621: leaves for six Italian years, filling a notebook with Titian that he will consult for life.
1632: London, a knighthood, a house at Blackfriars, and the title of principal painter to Charles I.
1640: marries Mary Ruthven, lady-in-waiting to the queen, as the king's world begins to crack.
1641: dies at 42; his daughter was born eight days earlier, and the civil war is months away.
The teenager with his own workshop
Van Dyck was born in Antwerp on March 22, 1599, the seventh child of a silk merchant. He was painting independently by about 1615, before the painters' guild formally admitted him as a master in 1618, and by around 1617 he was the chief assistant in the busiest studio in Europe, that of Peter Paul Rubens, who described the young man as the best of his pupils.
Italy, Genoa, and the Titian notebook
From 1621 to 1627 he worked in Italy, filling a sketchbook, now in the British Museum, with studies after Titian, the painter he copied all his life.
In Genoa he painted the banking nobility full length, slim, and slightly elevated, the viewer always looking up. That trick of the low horizon became standard aristocratic portraiture for two centuries.
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London, 1632: painter to the king
Charles I brought him to London in 1632, knighted him within months, granted him a 200 pound pension, and installed him in a house at Blackfriars with a private river landing so the king could visit by barge. Van Dyck produced the images by which we still see the Stuart court: the king hunting in the Louvre canvas of about 1635, and the triple portrait of 1635 to 1636 sent to Rome so Bernini could carve a bust.
The myth of the flatterer
Because his sitters lost a civil war, Van Dyck is remembered as the man who dressed doomed aristocrats in silk. Look longer and the flattery thins.
The faces are watchful, tired, and precisely individual, and the king he painted is a small man made monumental by staging, not by lying about the face.
English painters from Gainsborough to Lawrence borrowed the staging for 150 years, which is why a pointed beard is still called a Van Dyck.
A short life, a burned tomb, and where to see him
Van Dyck died at Blackfriars on December 9, 1641, at 42, eight days after the birth of his daughter Justiniana. He was buried in old St Paul's Cathedral, and his tomb vanished with the building in the Great Fire of 1666.
The National Gallery and the Royal Collection in London, the Prado, the Frick in New York, and the palaces of Genoa hold the essential works.
The Iconography
In his last decade Van Dyck ran a portrait project in print: the Iconography, roughly a hundred plates of princes, soldiers, scholars and, radically, painters.
He etched a handful of the plates himself, with a nervous, modern line collectors prize above the finished engravings.
Putting artists beside statesmen was the quiet manifesto: his profession belonged in the gallery of the important.
Painting silk at speed
The London studio ran on appointments: an hour's sitting for the face, then assistants continued with the costume arranged on a dummy.
The silk is what people cross museums for: long, loaded strokes that read as shine from three rooms away and as pure abstraction from ten centimeters.
Clients grumbled about the production line and kept booking. There was no substitute for looking like a Van Dyck.
The sunflower and the chain
He painted himself all his life: curls, silk, and once, famously, pointing at a sunflower while lifting a gold chain the king had given him.
The sunflower turns toward the sun as the courtier turns toward the crown. The chain says favor; the glance says he earned it.
Every society portraitist since, from Lawrence to Sargent, has worked inside the template he drew of himself.
The Anthony van Dyck questions that keep coming up
Was Van Dyck a student of Rubens? More collaborator than student. He entered the Rubens workshop already trained, around age 18, and Rubens called him the best of his pupils.
Why is Van Dyck important? He created the template of the English aristocratic portrait: full length, low horizon, casual elegance. Gainsborough, Reynolds, and Lawrence all worked inside it.
What is a Van Dyck beard? The pointed chin beard with mustache he wore and painted on his sitters. The fashion took his name in the nineteenth century and never gave it back.
How did Van Dyck die? Of illness in London on December 9, 1641, at 42, weakened after years of overwork and a final trip between Antwerp, Paris, and London.
Do lost Van Dycks still turn up? Regularly. A portrait bought for 400 pounds proved to be a Van Dyck study worth around 400,000; the workshop copied him so heavily that sleepers keep surfacing.
Did he have a family? A daughter, Justiniana, born to Mary Ruthven eight days before his death, and an earlier daughter in Antwerp he provided for in his will.
More secrets to unlock
Bought back by the crowd
In 2014 his last self-portrait was saved for Britain by a public campaign that raised 10 million pounds from more than 10,000 donors. The painter of kings was bought back by the crowd.
