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September Issue |
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Issue Date: OCTOBER 1999
Volume: 14
Issue: 10
Page: 110
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Van Dyck Rediscovered
BY SUSAN FEGLEY OSMOND
Born four hundred years ago, Anthony Van Dyck was a child prodigy who during his lifetime and often since was overshadowed by Rubens; but now three exhibitions bring his unique genius to light.
Thanks to the Belgian Tourist Office and Sabena Airlines for generous assistance in the creation of this article. For more information on art and cultural events in Belgium, see the Belgian Tourist Office's Web site at http://www.visitbelgium.com
In 1990, when the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., held an exhibition devoted to the paintings of seventeenth-century Flemish artist Anthony Van Dyck, I met a fellow critic coming out of the exhibition as I was going in. I asked him what he thought, and with a rather exasperated sigh he muttered, "Well, he's no Rubens."
For nearly four centuries it has been the lot of Van Dyck to be compared with his towering compatriot and onetime teacher. During his lifetime the younger artist had to make assiduous effort to come out from under the shadow of the elder--and for the most part he succeeded. Ever since, prevailing tastes of the day have dictated whether he was regarded as Rubens' equal, superior, or inferior. Every world-class museum invariably hangs pictures by Rubens and Van Dyck side by side, and in that context the younger artist's more reserved images can be overshadowed by the robust, flamboyant, opalescent ones by his mentor. Now, however, a trio of exhibitions mounted in honor of the four hundredth anniversary of Van Dyck's birth allow us to view him in his own terms, and one can only come away deeply impressed by his keen human insight, subtle lyricism, innate technical prowess, and the remarkable degree to which he foreshadowed later developments in art. Together, the exhibitions may well engender a greater public appreciation of this short-lived genius.
The exhibitions all opened last May in Van Dyck's native city of Antwerp, in northern Belgium. Van Dyck 1599--1641, a show of about a hundred paintings (and a few beautiful oil sketches), was at Antwerp's Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten through August 15 and is now at London's Royal Academy of Arts through December 10. Anthony Van Dyck as a Printmaker examines his engravings, sometimes side by side with his wonderfully expressive preparatory drawings, and also demonstrates the artist's widespread influence with a number of prints based on his paintings but made by others in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The show premiered at Antwerp's Museum Plantin-Moretus and comes to Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum October 9--January 9. The Light of Nature surveys a little-known aspect of Van Dyck's work, his landscape drawings and watercolors, and sets them in the context of similar works by his contemporaries in Italy, France, the Netherlands, and Flanders. This show opened at the Rubenshuis (Rubens' house) in Antwerp and is now at the British Museum, London, through November 28.
Antoon Van Dyck, as he is called in his native land, was born March 22, 1599, to a prosperous family with an international business in textiles. Antwerp at the time was just making a gradual and only partial recovery from forty years of rebellion and religious wars that, with the truce of 1609, ended with the creation of an independent northern Netherlands, while the southern Netherlands--of which Antwerp was part--remained under Spanish rule. During the wars, Antwerp--which had been the leading port of northern Europe--was devastated. As Van Dyck was growing up, Protestant Amsterdam was quickly replacing Catholic Antwerp as the major international port. A number of merchant families such as Van Dyck's had withstood the storms, however, and hundreds of artists were once again active--particularly in redecorating the churches, which had been stripped in the Protestant revolts.
Anthony was the seventh of twelve children. His mother died in childbirth when he was only eight, six weeks after his father purchased a grand family residence. Young Antoon showed artistic talent early on and in 1609 was registered in the painter's guild as a pupil of Hendrick van Balen, a conservative and highly successful artist who had studied with Adam van Noort, the teacher of Peter Paul Rubens and Jacob Jordaens. Rubens had just returned in 1608 from his extended trip to Italy and quickly became the city's preeminent artist, living in a style worthy of a prince.
It is not known how long Van Dyck trained under van Balen. In 1610 financial problems began to beset Anthony's family; by 1617, they were acute. Although he did not officially obtain the status of independent master until 1618, there is evidence that the teenager set up his own workshop around 1615 and took on an apprentice, probably to allay his family's financial crisis.
Unlike Rubens--and, indeed, many other great painters--Van Dyck was a natural art prodigy who by his early teens had developed a technical facility that dazzled contemporaries. His first Self-Portrait, dating from 1613--14, confidently asserts the arrival of a formidable new talent. From near total darkness a face turns to meet us, radiating light. His hair is unruly, his alert eyes intent, his mouth resolutely set. Pigment is laid on in thick impasto that revels in the materiality of paint and passionately commands it. A single, bold stroke denotes the white collar, announcing greatness: Here is one determined to leave his mark. It is a painting of extraordinary self-assurance for one so young.
Sometime around 1615, in addition to running his own small workshop, young Van Dyck began working in the studio of Rubens. He quickly rose from pupil to assistant and thence to chief assistant, painting copies of his master's work and also originals in the latter's style, to which Rubens would add finishing touches. Van Dyck had the ability to paint most convincingly in the manner of Rubens, and there is no doubt the older artist greatly influenced the younger; yet the ambitious teenager strove to find his own style that would set him apart.
Many of the independent works he did during this period were religious, such as Saint Martin Dividing His Cloak (1618--1620), which is based on a composition by Rubens and is done in a similar style but in a cooler, brighter tonality that differentiates the younger artist's paintings from the ruddier ones by his mentor. Rubens probably helped arrange many of these commissions, as well as others in a genre to which Rubens never wholeheartedly devoted himself: portraiture. It was the one for which Van Dyck became best known.
Van Dyck did a number of portraits of couples and families as well as single sitters during these years. Possibly the most arresting is Portrait of a Man and His Wife (1617--18). Here we have an unidentified well-to-do couple in late middle age, dressed in solemn black with large white neck ruffs. The man sits on the heraldic right of his wife (to the viewer's left), his left arm resting protectively on the back of her chair while his right hand holds hers in the traditional sign of marital fidelity. What makes this painting so arresting, however, is the facial expressions of this pair and the manner in which their hands are joined. She looks out with a forbidding glare so full of hardness, complaint, and bitterness as to border on the demented, yet underlying this is a dire vulnerability. Her husband, tilting his head gently to parallel his arm reaching to her hand, gazes at us with an expression blending unutterable sadness and compassion. At first glance he seems the weaker of the two, a much-harangued husband whose accomplishments in the greater world are unrecognized at home. Yet Van Dyck has painted his elegiac face with such eloquence as to convince us that this unremarked man bears a rare greatness of soul.
The husband is allowed to approach his wife's hand only from the side, and he holds it in such a way as to bring prominence to her middle finger; his clasp is not returned by his wife. What has happened to this couple? We can only speculate--but the very genius of this painting is that it compels us to speculate about the lives of these people. Van Dyck has not simply presented the acceptable outer visages of a married couple but has put his hand on the very pulse of their relationship and revealed what he perceived with candor as well as compassion. Even before he is twenty, he has the uncanny ability to peer into the souls of fellow human beings and picture what he finds. Yet in future years the socially ambitious painter would learn that it was sometimes more in his interest (and those of his clients) to keep the recesses of the soul undisclosed, or at least well camouflaged.Encountering Titian The young painter attracted the attention of foreign visitors to Antwerp, and in 1620 he went to London, where he worked for King James and also gained the patronage of aristocratic art connoisseurs, including the Earl of Arundel and Duke of Buckingham. In the art collection of the king and especially those of Arundel and Buckingham he was able to study firsthand, for the first time, Venetian painting of the sixteenth century. His encounter with works by Titian, in particular, proved to be a transforming experience. Christopher Brown, director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and curator of the paintings exhibition, writes in the exhibition catalog:
"Titian's style was seen by Van Dyck as quite different from Rubens' "sculptural" treatment of figures; Titian provided him with an alternative to the overpowering influence of Rubens. Although Van Dyck never felt the need to develop a different compositional manner, he did feel a need to develop a different stylistic language, and it was in this respect that Titian was so important."
Although Van Dyck was attracted by Titian's use of color, says Brown, he "was chiefly inspired by Titian's skill in modelling in tone, rendering flesh and fabric in a subtle play of light and shadow." Seeing the paintings in England made Van Dyck impatient to travel to Italy, and in February 1621, with the help of Arundel, he was granted a "passe to travaile for 8 moneths."
Van Dyck in fact spent the next eight months in Antwerp, where, liberated by his fresh encounter with Titian, he painted some of his most brilliant early works. A number of these were portraits that broke the formal constraints of Flemish portrait tradition to more vividly convey the personalities of his friends and colleagues. One of the finest of these is a vivacious portrait of Rubens' beloved wife, Isabella Brandt, which Van Dyck presented to his mentor as a parting gift before he took off for Italy. Rubens reputedly gave the young painter a horse for his journeys and introductions to colleagues and patrons in Italy.
Van Dyck was to remain there for six years. His base of operations was Genoa, though he took long trips to Rome and Venice as well. Unlike Rubens and the majority of artists who went on extended sojourn to Italy, Van Dyck did not open himself up to the entire panorama of art available on the peninsula--antiquity, Renaissance, and contemporary. He knew what he wanted, and what he wanted was Titian. He scoured each city for works by his favorite artist and made numerous copies of them in his sketchbook.
This general lack of interest in classical antiquity and things learned is a significant point of difference between Van Dyck and Rubens. The latter was widely read in the classics and was a serious collector of antiquities; he sometimes served as a diplomat and kept up a lively correspondence with some of the foremost scientific and cultural minds in Europe. He preferred to have someone read aloud from the classics as he worked in his studio. Van Dyck, on the other hand, did not have much formal education past the age of ten. His intelligence was primarily visual, supported mainly by direct life experience and his keen insight into people's personalities.
The results of this can be seen in the different output of these two bastions of seventeenth-century Flemish art. Rubens mostly went in for large-scale works, usually with religious or mythological subjects, in which he conveyed ideas using an arsenal of conventional yet theatrically enhanced gestures and symbols. Although he did a number of lively portraits, it was not his favorite genre. Van Dyck, though he likewise did a number of large-scale religious and a few mythological works, took a more personal, intuitive approach to his subjects, often giving more penetrating insight into the emotions of his protagonists. And, although he would have preferred to have made his reputation in history painting and the like, he was fated to be predominantly a portraitist--which fortunately was his forte. Whereas Rubens was a latter-day, many-sided Renaissance man, Van Dyck was what we, in hindsight, might call more a man of the modern era.
In Rubens' studio, Van Dyck had become accustomed to being in the company of aristocrats, and this affected his lifestyle forever after. The most important early biography of Van Dyck, written by Giovanni Pietro Bellori and published in 1672, noted that in Italy, Van Dyck's manners "were more those of an aristocrat than a common man, and he was conspicuous for the richness of his dress and the distinction of his appearance." The young painter traveled with a retinue of servants and had his own carriage. This earned the enmity of the rough-and-ready colony of Flemish artists in Rome, but it no doubt helped ingratiate him with noble patrons.
During his Italian sojourn he did a number of paintings of the nobility, particularly that of Genoa. His model for the composition of these was Rubens, who had painted a handful of Grand Manner portraits of the Genoa aristocracy two decades before. Van Dyck perfected the Grand Manner formula by giving his sitters an even greater sense of elegance and remote grandeur. He graduated from the half-length portraits of his Antwerp years, presenting these august personages full length (and often seated) in rich dress, placed against strongly articulated architecture, with flowing drapery somewhat alleviating the rigid formality of the presentation.
The purpose of these portraits was evidently to emphasize the elevated social stature of the sitters while seeming to give little away as to their individual personalities. Van Dyck nonetheless allows us to glimpse the strain (and sometimes the corrupting influence) of exalted position. In A Genoese Noblewoman and Her Son (c. 1625), for example, a woman with icy aspect, appearing rather stifled in a severe black dress with a large, tight neck ruff, sits in austere profile and clutches the left hand of her young, elegantly attired son. The latter, facing forward with right hand on hip, gazes at us with preternatural worldliness and disdain. The woman may have been a widow and her seven-or eight-year-old son the heir and new head of the family. This and Van Dyck's other portraits of Italian nobility are likely to make the viewer's blood run cold.
But the young painter brought a different style to informal paintings of his friends in Italy. One such is the double portrait Lucas and Cornelis de Wael (c. 1627). Sons of Antwerp painter Jan de Wael, these two brothers were both painters and were the focal point of the community of Flemish artists in Genoa. Their house became Van Dyck's base in Italy, and he painted this picture in gratitude for their generosity. Before a plain black background the brothers are captured in an informal yet dynamic pose as if they are in the midst of relaxed conversation with friends. The refined Cornelis sits with one arm slung toward us over the back of a chair and regards us with intelligent, humor-glinted eyes, while behind him his more earthy elder brother stands to one side, evidently engaging in good-natured concourse with others outside the picture while his arms frame the seated form of his brother. The axes of the two torsos form a V, as if they are twin trunks of the same tree. The brushwork is quite free--in fact, parts of the painting look deliberately unfinished. All of this gives a warmth and immediacy that is purposefully missing in Van Dyck's portraits of Italian nobles.
A striking self-portrait from about 1622--23 shows yet a third style or manner and is an example of Van Dyck foreshadowing developments far in the future. The last and most accomplished of three self-portraits in which the artist appears in similar dress (the other two were probably done in Antwerp in 1620 or 1621), it arrests one on sight as it seems to announce that Romanticism was born in the seventeenth century. One is inclined to nickname the painting "Van Dyck as Lord Byron." Before a charcoal background, the artist--in a dramatic black silk costume, the inner white shirt of which has its collar off-handedly splayed--takes a stance that is at once commanding and graceful. His left arm is akimbo and his right drapes over the elevated base of a ruined column. His eyes are intense, his slightly parted lips pursed, his auburn hair tousled. He is the very picture of the passionate young artiste. Yet pains are taken to draw attention to his elegant, tapered, ivory hands. No paintbrush or any signs of menial labor taint this image of genius.
As in his picture of the Wael brothers, the brushwork in this self-portrait is free--it is painted very thinly in some parts of the costume, while the head is fully worked up, and scumbled highlights are applied with an almost dry brush. What makes this different from the aristocrat portraits and those of his friends, however, is an overall fluidity and musicality of line, a singular lyric grace that was to become a hallmark of Van Dyck's later portraiture in England. Despite the underlying restlessness of the subject's gaze and pose, the painting overall has a wonderful harmony, a contrapuntal interconnectedness and unity that is new. By comparison, his other works of this period and earlier look stiff and chunky. In this self-portrait it is as if he has transposed--not only into the subtly spiraling composition drawn from Raphael but the very manner in which the whole is painted--the courtier's ideal of calculated nonchalance.
In September 1627, Van Dyck returned to Anwtwerp an affluent artist. During the nearly five years he spent back in his native land his output of portraits was prodigious. A devout Catholic to the end of his days, he also painted quite a number of religious pictures and altarpieces, all characterized by the emotionalism of the Counter-Reformation yet frequently showing striking originality of interpretation.
A large Samson and Delilah (c. 1630) shows that the artist has matured in psychological and emotional depth as well as technical skill. An earlier painting by Van Dyck on this subject (1618--20), also in the show, depicts Samson asleep on his seductress' lap and focuses on the tension of the moment as the conspirators stealthily prepare to shear him of his strength-giving hair. Delilah, a cold-blooded vixen, motions the others to be quiet so as not to wake the muscular but nondescript hero. The later painting, however, is rife with tumultuous movement and emotional undercurrents as Samson, already shorn, is wrenched from Delilah by guards who will shortly blind him. He writhes Laocošn-like, one hand lingering on his lover's thigh. Delilah, still under the languorous spell of lovemaking, has lost her heart to her victim and looks toward him dazedly with a mixture of longing and resignation. One of her hands stretches tenderly toward his anguished face while the other grips the bedclothes in guilt. But the real stunner of this picture is Samson. His face is the searing epitome of love betrayed. This is painting in the first person; there is nothing generic about it. Shock, indignation, soul-ruptured wounding, yet desperate longing and unquenchable love all register there. His eyes, glinting with unbelieving tears, rivet themselves upon his beloved to imprint her image on his mind as the last thing he sees on earth. Prince of Portraitists Early in 1632, Van Dyck moved again to London, where he was appointed principal painter to King Charles I and enjoyed privileges previously unknown in British royal patronage of artists. He was knighted within a few months of his arrival and was granted a large salary in addition to fees for each royally commissioned painting. The king bestowed upon him a luxurious studio on the Thames and had a jetty built especially so the monarch could disembark privately to visit him. Van Dyck had always been ambitious to achieve social recognition and a life of aristocratic luxury and privilege. Now, as an accepted member of the royal court circle, he had them.
In Protestant England, what was required of artists--most of whom came from the Continent--was almost exclusively portraiture. Artists had long been expected, however, to maintain the Tudor portrait tradition. By the time Van Dyck came to England, this had become a kind of calcified Holbein in which stiff, lifeless, decorative figures were presented in static compositions. Charles I, however, was a man of educated tastes and was a great fan of Titian, and he imported Van Dyck to bring new verve, grace, and sophistication to English painting. The artist succeeded so well in this revolution that his works became the model for English portraiture for the next 250 years. They profoundly influenced artists such as Reynolds, Gainsborough, and the American-born John Singer Sargent.
Van Dyck did numerous portraits of the king, his Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria, and their children; a few of these are in the exhibition. Some of his many royal portraits are emblems of royal authority, while others are more revealing of character--the king comes across as cultivated and sensitive, his wife as kind-hearted and rather shy; double portraits attest to a genuinely loving couple, while group portraits of their children are quite endearing.
Soon all the aristocracy wanted their portraits done and there was a such a flood of commissions that the artist--who would have preferred to be doing more history and mythological paintings--set up a virtual portrait factory in his workshop. In the space of seven years he and his studio produced as many as four hundred portraits--more than one a week. What attracted this deluge of noble patrons was not Van Dyck's ability to convey their personalities so much as his gift for dignifying them in stately Grand Manner presentations.
His style had matured, however, from the days when he enshrined the nobles of Genoa in frigid glory. He virtually abandoned the seated full-length portrait, preferring to show his subjects either standing or in motion full-length, or the more intimate standing in three-quarters length. His palette had generally lightened and become more harmonious and subtly blended; his lines were more soft, fluid, and living; to the end he was always interested more in surface effects than in giving the illusion of three-dimensional, sculptural forms, but he developed a sophisticated way of implying depth and aliveness through subtle atmospheric perspective; finally, he seemed more at ease with his sitters and they with him.
The paintings of Van Dyck's second English period have an autumnal, reflective quality not found in his previous work. Though still capable of convincingly communicating the haughty and intimidating, he increasingly brings a lyric grace, gentleness, and aristocratic spezzatura or ease of manner to his paintings, as well as a deepening sensitivity to character.
Throughout his career, Van Dyck did a number of double portraits. Some of these were of married couples, but others commemorated friendship or professional collaboration. One of the latter, Endymion Porter With the Artist (c. 1635), was the only work in which he portrayed himself with another person. Porter had first met Van Dyck in 1620 and had commissioned him to paint Rinaldo and Armida, probably the first of the artist's works to enter the royal collection and reputedly the painting that inspired Charles I to invite him to England. Van Dyck and the genial, intelligent courtier and art collector remained friends for the rest of the artist's life. In the portrait, there is an unusual diffidence in the painter's pose and expression, as if he is acknowledging some debt to the friendship of the older man. Porter occupies the superior position on the heraldic right; in shimmering pearl-gray doublet he appears robust, good-natured, yet shrewd and worldly-wise. Behind him stretches a lingering sunset. In contrast, Van Dyck, dressed with elegant restraint in black silk, appears rather frail. As in many of the artist's self-portraits, we see his face turned to us over his shoulder, as his body faces Porter. Behind him, dividing the portrait in half, is a dark gray drape, and to the right a sturdy column. The two men rest their hands (the artist's respectfully gloved) on a stone that represents enduring friendship.
Another double portrait, Thomas Killigrew and a Man "Not Known Certainly" (1638), strikes one as startlingly proto-Degas in the thin beige washes contrasting with black and white attire, and particularly in the use of space. The tawny-haired sitter facing us, his crooked left arm resting on a ruined column, is the courtier and playwright Thomas Killigrew. He is shown in mourning for his wife, Cecilia, as evidenced by the black band with her wedding ring around his wrist. It has been suggested that his companion is his brother-in-law, who lost his own wife within weeks of Cecilia's death. Unlike many of Van Dyck's paintings, this does not have a somber dark background. But the thinly painted beiges and tans accentuate all the more eloquently a sense of isolation and desolateness, even while the rhythmic counterbalancing of the two men's forms underscores their shared loss. This painting demonstrates something that can be noticed throughout the paintings exhibition, namely the remarkable degree to which Van Dyck will vary his style depending on the persons he portrays or the themes he takes up.
Van Dyck did not have many commissions to do mythological subjects, but one late work, the Cupid and Psyche of 1638--1640, anticipates the charming reveries of Watteau and the Rococo in its fluent delicacy. Tradition holds that the model for Psyche was the artist's mistress Margaret Lemon, and some have speculated that the figure of Cupid alighting to save her is Van Dyck's. The painting shows the lingering influence of Titian, yet the recumbent figure of Psyche has nothing to do with that artist's confident reclining nudes. Hovering between sleep and death, Psyche here has an utter vulnerability in which there is much tender pathos.
In 1639, upon the advice of the king--and despite the bitter opposition of his mistress, who reputedly attempted to bite off his thumb so he could never paint again--Van Dyck married a Scottish lady-in-waiting to the queen, Mary Ruthven. Like Henrietta Maria, she was a Catholic. By 1640, the political situation in England was deteriorating and Van Dyck was becoming frustrated by the lack of opportunities in London, so he began to consider returning to the southern Netherlands permanently. Rubens had died in 1640, leaving the way open for Van Dyck to take center stage there. Opportunity also briefly beckoned in Paris. Although he was in increasingly frail health, Van Dyck traveled to these places, engaging in intensive work. But by November 1641 he was seriously ill, probably with tuberculosis, and returned to London. There, eight days after his wife gave birth to their only child, he died. He was forty-two. The artist, who Bellori says "spent everything on living magnificently, more like a prince than a painter," succumbed to death less than a year before the brilliant society he had portrayed in his English portraits was destroyed by civil war.
The current paintings exhibition, and the other two that we have not delved into here, show Van Dyck to have been one of the leading lights of the many-geniused seventeenth century--one who cast a long shadow. His portraiture, as we noted, influenced that for centuries to come. His delicate touch and lyricism foreshadowed the French Rococo. Some of his brushwork and compositions even anticipated the revolutions of Manet and Degas. His emphasis on the painting surface (rather than on making an illusion of sculptural forms) and his increasing facility in conveying atmospherics--as if his colors were hanging on air--made him a direct ancestor of Impressionism. But above all, the grace, subtlety, and humanity of his portrayals make him universal.n
Susan Fegley Osmond is an editor for the Arts section of The World & I.
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