Last years in England of Anthony van Dyck

After a brief trip to Holland in February 1632, van Dyck again went to England, where he became highly successful. King Charles I appointed him “principalle Paynter in ordinary of their Majesties” and knighted him. He gave him a golden chain and settled upon him an annual salary of £200 sterling. Yet, in March 1634 van Dyck returned once again to Antwerp, ostensibly to settle matters connected with his family estate but probably also to establish contacts with the new Spanish governor expected in the fall of that year. The Antwerp guild of artists appointed him “honorary dean,” a title that had been bestowed before only on Rubens. In 1635 van Dyck was again in England, after about a year’s absence.

He lived in Blackfriars in London, outside the jurisdiction of the local guild, where Charles I liked to visit him. During the summer van Dyck was given a place in Eltham Palace (located in present-day London). His work now consisted almost exclusively of painting portraits, and they are his most popular.

The visual image of English society prior to the revolution of 1648 has forever been shaped by van Dyck. Charles I himself was frequently portrayed by the master and nowhere perhaps more revealingly than in a beautiful canvas in Paris, Charles I at the Hunt (c. 1635), in which he appears “as he would have wished to live in history: a figure of matchless elegance, of unquestioned authority and high culture, the patron of the arts, and the upholder of the divine right of kings” (E.H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 1950). A portrait showing three views of the king (1635–36) was made to serve for a bust to be made by Gian Lorenzo Bernini; the sculpture was destroyed in a fire, however, in 1698.

As in his Italian portraits, full-length renderings prevail, but his English patrons seem more rigid and, as a rule, more prosaic than their Latin counterparts. An unusual feature, reflecting a literary vogue, is allegorical attributes and mythological disguises. Ladies often are pictured with roses or holding a hand under water running from an urn. Portraying himself with a sunflower, van Dyck expresses emblematically his devotion to the king.

Van Dyck’s gift for combining formality and casualness shows up particularly well in portrait commissions involving groups of people. To his last decade belong a little-known picture of the family of John, count of Nassau-Siegen (1634), and the largest of all his extant paintings (more than 19 feet [580 cm] wide), of the family of Philip Herbert, earl of Pembroke (c. 1635). In his several versions of the children of Charles I, among other pictures, he gives to his models all their youthful innocence no matter how gravely dignified their pose.

Van Dyck organized his portrait painting in an efficient manner designed also to increase his prestige. He gave hourly appointments to his sitters, leaving the execution of accessories to his assistants. While the king paid slowly and at times was even forced to reduce the artist’s demands, van Dyck derived a comfortable income from his many portraits. His life matched in luxury that of his clients. In 1639 he married Mary Ruthven, by whom he had one daughter.

He must have realized, however, that the political fortunes of the Stuart monarchy were declining. He had failed in an ambitious plan to decorate the Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace with a “Procession of the Knights of the Garter” in tapestry, and in September 1640 he again left England, induced possibly by the hope of taking the place of Rubens, who had died in May. In nervous haste he went from Antwerp to Paris, thence back to London, and again to Paris. At the end of November 1641 he returned to London, sick and having failed in his projects. He died shortly thereafter and was buried in St. Paul’s.