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Anthony Van Dyck - Flemish Portrait Painter

Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641) was one of the great Flemish Painters of the 17th century. His refined and elegant style is an underlying strength in all of his works. He is perhaps best known as the painter for Charles I for whom he created a multitude of portraits with royalty as subjects. Our SegPlayPC collection of 29 images showcases many of his well-known portrait images. You'll find several self-portraits (including the Sunflower one). There are also portraits of Charles I, Henrietta Marie, Elena Grimaldi, Marie-Louise de Tassis, Frans and Margareta Synders, William II Prince of Orange, Nicholas Lanier, Isabella Brant, and the three eldest children of Charles I.

Sir Anthony van Dyck (March 22, 1599 - December 9, 1641) was a Flemish artist who became the leading portrait painter to the English court. He portrayed his royal subjects in an elegantly relaxed style that would influence English portrait painting until the end of the 18th century. He was an outstanding draftsman and a master of etching and watercolors.

Van Dyck was born in Antwerp to a wealthy family. His talent for painting was clear still very young, and his parents apprenticed him to a local artist when he was just 10 years old. By the time he was 15 Van Dyck was already a highly accomplished independent painter, sharing a studio with his friend Jan Brueghel the Younger. At the age of 19 he became a master of the Antwerp painters’ guild.

Peter Paul Rubens soon learned of the young Van Dyck’s talent and took him on as his chief assistant. Rubens had a huge influence on Van Dyck, especially in composition, but because Rubens dominated the small Antwerp art market Van Dyck made his career outside of Flanders. In 1620, he went to England to paint the portrait of King James I and it was in London that Van Dyck became exposed to works by Titian, whose use of color he adopted.

Van Dyck remained in England for around four months after which he returned to Flanders. But he did not stay for long; the following year he traveled to Italy to study the Italian masters and spent six years there as a successful portrait painter. He received commissions to paint the portraits of the Genoese nobility and he soon gained a reputation as a talented painter of aristocratic portraits who represented his sitters with refinement, elegance and dignity. Indeed, his fellow artists considered him to be more like a member of the aristocracy than an artist. He dressed in silks and feathers and was completely at ease in the company of nobility and royalty.

In 1627 Van Dyck left Italy and returned to Antwerp, where his ease in mixing with the aristocracy helped gain him more important commissions. He was so successful that by 1630 he rivaled Rubens in popularity. During this period he began to make etchings and he painted a series of religious paintings.

Van Dyck’s reputation soon spread outside Flanders and King Charles I of England, a great lover of art, invited Van Dyck to England as portrait painter to the royal court in 1632. The king was very short -- under five feet tall -- but Van Dyck rose to the challenge, portraying him with so much majesty and dignity that the king immediately gave him a knighthood and a fine house with a studio.

In England, Van Dyck’s style combined the authority of his subjects with the relaxed elegance of his Italian years. Many of his sitters were portrayed against the backdrop of a landscape to give emphasis to the informal style of portraiture he had developed.

English citizenship was granted to Van Dyck in 1638 and the following year he married Mary, the daughter of a Lord and one of the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting. Van Dyck left England for a short time in 1640-41 as Civil War loomed. He went to Flanders and then to France, but in the summer of 1641 he fell ill in Paris and returned to his house in London where he died shortly after.

Anthony Van Dyck, who in life had lived more like a prince than a painter, was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral. The King was so stricken with grief that he erected a monument in his memory.

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