Art: White-Haired Boy

Sir Anthony Van Dyck was one of the best art students that ever lived, and the special pet of Antwerp’s great painter Peter Paul Rubens. In Antwerp’s Koninklijk Museum last week, painters and art lovers were learning from Student Van Dyck. The exhibition, in celebration of the 350th anniversary of his birth, contained 134 paintings, sketches and etchings, showed both the strengths and weaknesses of imitative, academic genius.

The seventh child of a rich silk merchant, Van Dyck was an artist at 16, with his own studio and students. He did fine, for Antwerp rattled with commerce and bulged with gold; and its beefy, bearded burghers all wanted portraits of themselves and their wives. But the aristocratic little portraitist was far from satisfied with his own work. At 19 he got admittance to the artists’ Guild of Saint Luke, and at 20 went back to school, at Rubens’ feet.

Purity & Flavor. The master had turned his palace into a picture factory, where his students did most of the work. Rubens would supply them with sketches, add a few finishing touches when the paintings were done, and sign them with a flourish. He soon found that young Van Dyck’s work needed no finishing touches. Experts have since despaired of telling some of their portraits apart. The student’s are as bold and right as the master’s own, with the same purity and flavor, and only a little less body—for with all his talents, Van Dyck lacked Rubens’ typically Flemish delight in pink-and-white flesh.

When he had learned all that Rubens could teach him, Van Dyck made a trip to London, where he was ignored, and then circled down to Italy, where he found new old masters whose work taught him as much as Rubens’ had: Titian and Veronese. Their paintings strengthened his like a blood transfusion, flooding his pictures with dark, rich colors and dignifying their shadowed backgrounds with glimpses of formal gardens, pillars and balustrades. With his liveried servants and coach & four, Van Dyck earned nothing but sneers from Rome’s bohemian painters. But his manners as well as his brush charmed the

Genoese nobility, and in five years in Genoa he painted half the cavaliers and haughty ladies of the houses of Doria, Brignole Sale, Pallavicini, Balbi, Cattaneo, Spinola, Lommelini and Grimaldi.

Pride & Pallor. On his second trip to London Van Dyck became king’s pet. He was taken up by Charles I (who was something of a connoisseur), knighted, and persuaded to stay. The Crown gave him a summer residence at Eltham Palace and he spent his winters in Blackfriars. He painted 36 known portraits of the king, 25 of Queen Henrietta Maria. The British nobility followed the king to Van Dyck’s studio, and suiting his art to his sitters, he forsook the rich palette of his Italian period to paint them in proud, pale, silver-grey tones.

In England, Van Dyck had everything, but like King Charles, he couldn’t keep it. The elegant night life wore him down; the importunities of such lovely mistresses as Margaret Lemon (who once tried to stab his painting hand) exhausted him. At 40, Van Dyck left England to Cromwell’s Roundheads, returned to Antwerp. He had hopes of becoming Rubens’ successor in the field of mythological and religious painting, but within three years he died. Had he lived longer, the crackerjack art student, playboy and plaything of society might have known disappointment ; big things were not in his line.

Yet the best of Van Dyck’s portraits would live as long as the paint stayed on the canvas. Seen in the cold, impersonal surroundings of the Koninklijk Museum last week, they looked a little ill at ease, for they had been intended to grace warmer, more elegant worlds. But the paintings themselves had warmth and elegance enough to make 17th Century history, and to make the people who strutted through it come alive.