All oil paintings of Anthony van Dyck (17 century, Belgian,
Baroque) will be hand painted by our professional artists. Let HandmadePiece help you bring better museum quality art reproductions of Anthony van Dyck to home. Photo preview of the finished art will be offered before delivery, global free shipping.
1599 - 1641 • Flemish • Painter • Baroque
"... the best of my pupils." - Rubens,1618
A child prodigy who studied painting at the age of 10 and registered as a master in the GUILD before his 19th birthday, van Dyck was playing a major role in the execution of RUBENS's designs at 21, the age at which he became court painter to James I of England. His talent and fame soared, as did his commissions. The seventh child in a prosperous merchant family, he seems to have been a deeply religious Catholic, but his personality and philosophical point of view are not reliably documented. Biographical hearsay suggests that he was excessively fond of luxury, proud, ambitious, sensitive, excitable, and highly competitive. If Rubens set the standard for his century as both painter and gentleman, van Dyck came as close as anyone else to meeting it. To Rubens's stylistic exemplar van Dyck added TITIAN's Venetian coloring and atmosphere; on his travels throughout Italy he filled his sketchbook with studies after Titian (and may even have sparked Rubens's interest in the Venetian's work). Rubens and van Dyck together changed the formal, standardized concept of portraiture. In Charles I, King of England, Hunting(cg. 1635) van Dyck portrayed the ill-fated king dismounted, standing casually in front of his horse, which seems to genuflect respectfully (see EQUESTRIAN). In painting sinuously elegant noblewomen, van Dyck increased the length of their bodies to nearly twice the norm, reminiscent of the GOTHIC International Style's hyper-elegance. His Marchesa Elena Grimaldi Cattaneo (1623), in which a Genoese noblewoman stands beneath a ruby red umbrella held by an African page, brings to mind that Genoa was a key port in the slave trade of the 16th and 17th centuries. In that age of exploration, painters of the BAROQUE were fascinated by the foreign and exotic. Painter to royalty in the Netherlands and in England, in 1632 van Dyck was appointed "Principalle Paynter in Ordinary to their Majesties," knighted, and presented with a gold chain by Charles I. In 1635 a special road and dock were constructed to facilitate the king's visits to van Dyck's studio. Van Dyck died in 1641, however, only 42 years old. Rubens had died the previous year and Charles would be beheaded in 1649.