Anthony van Dyck

Anthony van Dyck was the most talented young painter in Antwerp before he was twenty, and everybody involved knew it. He was born in 1599 to a prosperous silk merchant, entered the guild early and was working in the orbit of Peter Paul Rubens while still a teenager. Rubens ran a large production shop and van Dyck was the assistant whose hand is hardest to separate from the master. That apprenticeship gave him the Flemish baroque machinery: big canvases, warm flesh, confident drapery.

The Cleveland picture of a Genoese lady and her child comes from what happened next. Van Dyck went to Italy in 1621 and stayed about six years, based largely in Genoa with trips to Rome, Venice, Palermo and elsewhere. Genoa had a banking aristocracy with money and no local painter of that calibre, and he filled the gap. The full length Genoese portraits are where the formula gets assembled, and the Cleveland canvas shows it working on a mother and child.

What he took from Italy and from Rubens

In Venice he studied Titian closely, copying compositions into a sketchbook that still survives. The Venetian lesson was about colour temperature and about letting a portrait carry atmosphere rather than only description. From Rubens he had already taken scale and energy. Putting the two together produced something neither man made: a portrait that is grand in construction and cool in mood, with silvery greys and blacks doing most of the work and the flesh kept pale against them.

The pose is doing a lot of the labour in these pictures. Van Dyck drops the horizon so the viewer looks slightly up at the sitter, sets a column or a heavy curtain behind the shoulder, and turns the body away from the frame while the head comes back toward it. That twist reads as ease rather than stiffness. A person standing that way appears to have arrived a moment ago and to be perfectly comfortable being looked at, which is precisely what the client was paying for.

He returned to Antwerp in 1627 and then moved to London in 1632, where Charles I made him principal painter and knighted him. The English years produced the images that fixed the Stuart court in the national memory, including the triple portrait of the king painted as a guide for a sculptor in Rome. He kept a large studio, used assistants heavily for costume and background, and died in London in 1641 at forty two.

• A low viewpoint that puts the sitter slightly above the person looking at the picture
• Hands placed deliberately, often one at rest and one holding a glove, a hilt or a chair
• Cool silver greys and blacks with the flesh kept lighter than the surroundings
• A column, curtain or open sky used to give the figure architectural support
• Proportions gently elongated, especially the hands and the neck
• Studio assistance visible in costume and background while the head stays autograph

The English inheritance is impossible to overstate. Peter Lely took over the court practice after van Dyck died, Godfrey Kneller followed Lely, and by the time Reynolds and Gainsborough set up in the middle of the next century the van Dyck pose was the default grammar of British portraiture. Gainsborough dressed sitters in van Dyck costume on purpose. The formula survived into photography, where the standing three quarter view with a hand on a chair back is still recognisably his.

Reading a van Dyck without the flattery

The obvious criticism is that everyone in these portraits looks noble, which cannot have been true. The answer is that flattery was the commission, and the interest lies in how much observation he smuggled in underneath it. Look at the mouths and the set of the eyes rather than the costume. In the better pictures there is a specific, slightly guarded person inside the performance, and the tension between the two is what keeps the work alive.

Van Dyck is the point where the European portrait stops being a record of a face and becomes a piece of staging that the sitter commissions about himself.

Editorial note, Canvara

For collectors and curious viewers the practical issue is workshop production. Autograph van Dyck heads are scarce and expensive, while studio replicas, later copies and school pieces circulate in quantity. The head and hands carry the evidence, since assistants handled cloth and background. Any attribution above the level of circle of van Dyck needs documents behind it, not just a convincing pose.