The Pride Of Flanders

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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Of all the many followers of Rubens, the two most famous were Van Dyck and Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678), another exuberant Fleming, who though greatly influenced by Rubens was never actually his pupil. The ‘Riches of Autumn’ in the Wallace Collection is a fine example of the bacchanalian opulence of Jordaens. The fruit, vegetables, and most of the foliage in this picture are painted by Frans Snyders (1579-1657), a noted painter of ‘still-life’ who frequently collaborated with Rubens and other painters. The skill of Jordaens as a portrait-painter may be seen in his ‘Baron Waha de Linter of Namur’ in the National Gallery, but though a capable and skillful painter of whatever was before him, Jordaens had no imagination and added little of his own to the art of Rubens.

Antony Van Dyck, who was born at Antwerp in 1599, was supposed to have entered the studio of Rubens as a boy of thirteen, but recent research has shown he was originally a pupil of Hendrick van Balen and did not enter the studio of Rubens till about 1618. He was the favorite as well as the most famous of his master’s pupils, and yet temperamentally he was miles apart from Rubens. Where Rubens made all his sitters robust and lusty, Van Dyck made his refined and spiritual. From Rubens he learnt how to use his tools, but as soon as he had mastered them he obtained widely different results. The English Ambassador at The Hague persuaded Van Dyck to visit England in 1620 when he was only just of age, but at that time he made only a short stay, and after his return to Antwerp Rubens urged him to visit Italy. It was good advice. The dreamy, poetic-looking youth, whose charming painting of himself at this time we may see in the National Portrait Gallery, London, was spiritually nearer akin to the Italian than to the Flemish painters. What he learnt from them, especially from Titian, may be seen in ‘The Artist as a Shepherd’ in the Wallace Collection, painted about 1625-6, and from the still more splendid portraits in the National Gallery of the Marchese and Marchesa Cattaneo, both painted during the artist’s second stay in Genoa.

Strengthened and polished by his knowledge of Italian art, Van Dyck returned to Antwerp, there to paint among many other fine things two of his outstanding achievements in portraiture, the paintings of Philippe Le Roy and his wife which now hang in the Wallace Collection. These portraits of the Governor of the Netherlands and his wife were painted in 1630 and 1631, when the artist was little over thirty years of age, and in the following year the young painter was invited by Charles I to visit England, where he became Sir Antony Van Dyck, Principal Painter in Ordinary to His Majesty.

His great equestrian portrait ‘Charles I on Horseback,’ passed through several hands before it found a permanent home in the National Gallery. When King Charles’s art collection was sold by the Puritans in 1649, this picture passed into the collection of the Elector of Bavaria. Afterwards it was purchased at Munich by the great Duke of Marlborough, from whose descendant it was bought in 1885 for the National Gallery, the price given for this and Raphael’s ‘Ansidei Madonna’ being £87500.

After he had established himself in England Van Dyck slightly altered his manner, creating a style of portraiture which was slavishly followed by his successors, Sir Peter Lely and Sir Godfrey Kneller.

To speak of the elegance of Van Dyck’s portraits is to repeat a commonplace, but what the causal observer is apt to overlook is that this elegance penetrates below externals to the mind and spirit of the sitter. Of his powers in both directions an exquisite example is the portrait group of ‘Lords John and Bernard Stuart’, one of the most beautiful pictures he ever painted in England, and a work which proves Van Dyck to have been not only a supremely fluent master of the brush, but also a profound and penetrating psychologist.

Had he lived longer no one can say what other masterpieces he might have achieved: but unfortunately, with all his other great qualities as a painter, Van Dyck lacked the health and strength of his master Rubens. How good-looking he was in his youth, we can see by the charming portrait of himself which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, but this refined, almost girlish face suggests delicacy and weakness. Weak in a way, he was; though not spoiled by success, he could not stand the social whirl and dissipation on which a Rubens could thrive. Very superstitious, he was a victim to quacks and spent much time and money in endeavoring to discover the philosopher’s stone. It is said that his failure to find this precious fable of the alchemists preyed on his mind and contributed to his collapse in 1641, when, though no more than forty two, his frail body was worn out with gout and excesses. On the death of Rubens in 1640 Van Dyck went over to Antwerp. It was his last journey, and soon after his return to London he joined his great compatriot among the ranks of the illustrious dead.

Van Dyck established a style in portraiture which succeeding generations of painters have endeavored to imitate; but none has surpassed, few have approached him, and when we look among his predecessors we have to go back to Botticelli before we find another poet-painter who with equal, though different, exquisiteness mirrored not merely the bodies but the very souls of humanity.

After Van Dyck’s death, numerous imitators, both British and Flemish, endeavored to copy his style of portraiture, but the next great impetus art was to receive after Rubens came, not from England nor from Flanders, but from Spain. It is to the contrary of Velazquez and Murillo, therefore, that we must next turn our attention.