Anthony Van Dyck E-Book

Natalia Gritsai

• Herausgeber: Parkstone International
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 90

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

17th-century Flemish painter Van Dyck’s career was as short as it was dazzling. A student of Rubens, he very quickly became the favourite painter of princes and kings and was the portraitist of English and Italian families of the high nobility. With his rigorous compositions, Van Dyck endowed his models with dignity, grandeur, and spirituality. Proud ladies and lords gambolling on their horses − Van Dyck knew how to render the nonchalant elegance and the ennui of a refined society. A Baroque painter with a shimmering style, he played with a light and nuanced palette, and reproduced, with the greatest virtuosity, garments of velour, satin, and silk. Van Dyck is considered the founder of the English school of portraiture. He was an influence on Lely, Dobson, Kneller, and most notably Reynolds and Gainsborough, as well as French painters of the 18th century.

Leseprobe

NATALIA GRITSAI

Text: Natalia Gritsai

Cover: Stéphanie Angoh

Layout: Griet De Vis

© Confidential Concepts, Worldwide, USA

© Parkstone Press USA, New York

© Image Barwww.image-bar.com

ISBN: 978-1-78310-428-4

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be produced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world.

Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

Contents

VAN DYCK’S PAINTINGS IN THE HERMITAGE THE HISTORY OF THECOLLECTION

THE FIRST ANTWERP PERIOD Around 1616-1621

THE ITALIAN PERIOD 1621-1627

SECOND ANTWERP PERIOD 1628-1632

THE ENGLISH PERIOD 1632-1641

BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX OF WORKS

VAN DYCK’S PAINTINGS IN THE HERMITAGE THE HISTORY OF THE COLLECTION

To this day the name of the seventeenth-century Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) remains a symbol of artistic refinement. Yet his real contribution to art lies in his novel approach to the representation of the subject, his perception of each human being as a unique individuality which reveals itself only on direct contact, not through mere contemplation. In his day Van Dyck had his greatest success as a portraitist. He created painted portraits throughout his life, and in his later periods graphic portraits as well. It was as a portraitist that the artist gained worldwide recognition and went down in the history of seventeenth-century European art.

As an artist of great creative range, however, Van Dyck worked in many genres: he produced historical compositions, allegorical pictures, landscapes – and was well able to tackle any artistic task. And if his thematic compositions often display a portraitist’s power of observation, his portrait style bears the mark of the techniques used in historical pictures.

Van Dyck’s portraits are of diverse type. The range of his powers as a portraitist seems infinite, stretching from fleeting sketches done on the move or from memory to painstaking studies from life, from intimate works to grand, monumental portraits and often humorous “historical pictures” depicting the subject in the guise of a character from classical mythology or a contemporary play. The artist’s portrait gallery is a real monument to his time, and presents us with both a living image of the artist’s contemporaries and that ideal of the beautiful individual which he established in his art…

Van Dyck’s age marked a new stage in the art of the small country of the South Netherlands (often called Flanders, after its largest province). It was a time that saw the development, followed by the brilliant affirmation, of the national school of painting. The Dutch rebellion of the late sixteenth century led to the secession of the northern provinces (Holland) to become the independent republic of the United Provinces, while the southern provinces remained under Spanish rule. Netherlandish art split into two independent national schools – the Dutch and the Flemish.

The greatest achievements of seventeenth-century Flemish art are linked with Rubens and his close associates, of whom Van Dyck was indisputably the finest. Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) was the recognized leader of the Flemish School. He set Flemish culture on new paths by creating art that was closely in tune with its time, art that was imbued with a sublime humanist spirit, vividly emotional, dynamic, passionate, bursting with life-affirming power. Van Dyck transformed Rubens’ artistic discoveries in his own special way, attaining a skill in portraiture that remains unmatched.

The Hermitage collection (with which this publication mostly concerns itself), supplemented by some of the master’s pictures in other museums, allows us to form a comprehensive picture of Van Dyck’s portrait œuvre. It includes works from all the artist’s creative periods: the First and Second Antwerp Periods, the Italian Period, and the English Period, forming one of the largest sections in the Hermitage’s collection of Flemish art, which also features important paintings by other leading Flemish masters – Rubens, Jordaens, and Snyders. All of these collections belong to the core of the Museum’s old collection dating from the eighteenth century, a time when the works of Flemish painters were ranked as some of the most coveted items in Western Europe. They were particularly in demand in Paris – Europe’s most important art market. From the 1760s almost to the end of the century, the French capital was the principal source of paintings for the rapidly expanding picture gallery of St Petersburg’s Hermitage.

The foundations of this museum born in the Age of Enlightenment were laid by Empress Catherine the Great (1729–96). In 1764 she acquired the collection of the Berlin merchant Johann Ernest Gotzkowsky, who offered the Empress his pictures through the Russian ambassador in Prussia, in settlement of his debt to the Russian treasury. Ever since, 1764 has been taken as the date of the foundation of the Hermitage. Catherine the Great’s successes in the field of collecting were greatly aided by the fact that she was able to enlist as intermediaries and experts such eminent connoisseurs as the celebrated French philosopher and art critic Denis Diderot, the sculptor Etienne Maurice Falconet, the encyclopedist Melchior Grimm, and the Russian ambassador in Paris and subsequently The Hague, Dmitry Golitsyn. The last was one of the most enlightened figures of Catherine’s time, an honorary member of the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg, and a friend of Diderot and Falconet.

It was Golitsyn, in particular, who acted on behalf of the Empress to acquire pictures for the Hermitage collection. Golitsyn maintained close links with Diderot and Grimm, and also with the Geneva collector François Tronchin, who had contacts in Parisian artistic circles. He strove never to miss the opportunity of making an interesting acquisition, both at auctions (in Paris, The Hague, and Amsterdam) and through direct negotiations with owners. The latter was probably the case with the purchase, some time before 1774, of one of the finest pictures in the Hermitage’s Flemish collection – Van Dyck’s Family Portrait. According to some sources,[1] a certain Madame Grunblots of Brussels, who had acquired the portrait in 1770 at the sale of the La Live de Jully collection in Paris, gave it to the Russian Empress soon afterwards.

1. Philadelphia and Elizabeth Wharton, 1640, The Hermitage, St Petersburg.

2. King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria with Charles, Prince of Wales and Princess Mary, 1632, Collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

3. Self-Portrait, 1630s, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

4. Alexei Antropov, Catherine the Great, 1762, Museum of History and Art, Sergiyev-Posad, Moscow region.

However, most of the Van Dycks currently in the Hermitage entered the museum as a result of Catherine II’s purchase of two celebrated European eighteenth-century collections: the Crozat collection,[2] acquired in France in 1772, and the picture gallery of Lord Walpole,[3] acquired in England in 1779. The first enriched the Hermitage with eleven Van Dycks, the second with fourteen.

In 1783 the celebrated Parisian collection of Count Baudouin came into the Hermitage, bringing another five Van Dyck portraits.[4] A further two works whose exact provenance has not been ascertained[5] come from other, less renowned, eighteenth-century French collections, as do two portraits which only entered the museum this century (in 1932) and which were once in the possession of Count Alexander Stroganov, who bought them during his sojourn in Paris, between 1769 and 1779.[6] While the Hermitage is indebted primarily to French collections for paintings from both the artist’s Antwerp periods and his Italian Period, it is indebted Walpole for nearly all his English works in its possession, in particular the portraits of the Wharton family, which Robert Walpole acquired around 1725 from the last surviving member of that family in Winchendon. Given the manner of its acquisition, it is only natural that the character of the Hermitage collection reflects the tastes of eighteenth-century art-lovers.

At that time European collectors valued Van Dyck above all for his skill as a portraitist, and so bought up almost exclusively his portrait works. The general standard of the collections from which the Hermitage acquired Van Dyck’s works was extraordinarily high. Suffice it to say that in the Paris of the mid-eighteenth century the Crozat collection had no equal. It is no accident that the French collector and art connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette, who was himself an engraver and publisher, based his essay on Van Dyck largely on examples of his work in the Crozat collection. Those included such recognized masterpieces as Self-Portrait, portraits of Everhard Jabach and Marc-Antoine Lumagne, and Portrait of a Man, which was long thought to be a portrait of the Antwerp doctor Lazarus Maharkyzus.

In eighteenth-century England, too, artists and art lovers saw Van Dyck primarily as a brilliant portraitist. The famous English painter Joshua Reynolds, first President of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, wrote enthusiastically of him: “Van Dyck is the greatest portraitist who has ever lived.” He was echoed by the painter and engraver William Hogarth, who wrote in his Analysis of Beauty (1753) that he considered the Flemish artist to be in many respects one of the best known portraitists.[7] So it is scarcely surprising that English collections also concentrated on Van Dyck’s portrait works. Walpole’s collection was no exception: it contained only one of Van Dyck’s subject compositions, The Virgin of the Partridges (The Rest on the Flight into Egypt), a masterpiece from his Second Antwerp Period.

At various times, and for various reasons, some of Van Dyck’s works left the Hermitage. In the 1930s, for example, the museum sold several paintings that had come from Walpole’s collection: portraits of Philip Wharton and Isabella Brant (the latter was then thought to be by Rubens but is in fact one of Van Dyck’s early works, painted shortly before his departure for Italy), and two works from the artist’s first Antwerp period: Portrait of a Young Woman (thought at the time to be the companion to Portrait of a Young Man) and Portrait of Suzanna Fourment and her Daughter. All four are now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. In 1924 and 1930 three works from Van Dyck’s Second Antwerp Period were transferred to the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow: Portrait of Jan van den Wouwer and two companion portraits, of Adriaen Stevens and his wife, Maria Bosschaerts. All three had been acquired by the Hermitage in 1783 from the Paris collection of Count Baudouin.

The Van Dyck pictures now in the Hermitage represent nearly every type of portrait developed by the master: from his formal commissioned works to those he painted for his own pleasure, for himself and those close to him. The museum lacks only examples of the large-scale portraits from his Italian period. The Hermitage’s rich collection allows us not only to trace the artist’s creative course, but also to marvel at his virtuosity as a portraitist and the sheer variety of his means of expression, technical methods, and compositional solutions.

5. Isabella Brant,