Object data
oil on canvas
support: height c. 64.7 cm × width c. 49.4 cm × thickness 1.1 cm
outer size: depth 7.3 cm (support incl. frame)
Anthony van Dyck (after)
Christ as Saviour of the World
c. 1620 - c. 1630
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: M. van de Laar, RMA, 24 January 2006
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 18 February 2010
Conservation
- conservator unknown, 1968: treated
- V. Blok, 2003: paint consolidated
Provenance
…; ? collection Erasmus Quellinus II (1607-78), (‘Jesus mette Werelt naer Van Dijck’);1…; from H.L. van Molman, fl. 170, to Everhardus Temminck (1758-1837) (‘Een Salvator Mundi of Christushoofd, welke gehouden wordt, geschilderd door Rubens’), 6 July 1803;2 recorded as remaining in The Hague, 1809;3 transferred from the Mauritshuis, The Hague, to the museum, 21 July 1885, as unknown seventeenth-century master
Object number: SK-A-1224
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Anthony van Dyck (Antwerp 1599 - London 1641)
Anthony van Dyck was baptized in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk, Antwerp, on 22 March 1599, the seventh child of a prosperous haberdasher. He died on 9 December 1641 in Blackfriars, London, and was buried two days later in Saint Paul’s Cathedral. By then he was internationally famous, and had to his credit an oeuvre of well over seven hundred paintings, consisting mostly in portraits, but also some highly esteemed sacred and profane figure subjects. He had outlived Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), who had greatly influenced him in his youth, by only some eighteen months, but he was to prove the more widely influential.
Enrolled as a pupil of Hendrik van Balen (1574/1575-1632) in 1609, he became a master in the Antwerp guild of St Luke nine years later before he was eighteen and a week before he received his majority – an event perhaps connected with this father’s financial difficulties which had begun in 1615 and ended with the sale of the family house in 1620, having caused strife in the family. In the meantime, Van Dyck had earlier entered Rubens’s studio, and had perhaps already operated unofficially as an artist working from a house in Antwerp called Den Dom van Ceulen. He was the only one of Rubens’s assistants to be named in the contract for the paintings for the Antwerp Jesuit Church signed on 22 March 1620.
There is no contemporary archival evidence for the existence of a studio functioning for Van Dyck before he left Antwerp for London and Rome. However, statements given in a lawsuit in Antwerp in 1660/1661 and the number of contemporary versions of some of Van Dyck’s works of that time would indicate at the least that there was a group of artists working in Van Dyck’s milieu, however informally.4
Van Dyck left Antwerp for London in October 1620; the purpose of his short visit – he was granted permission to leave at the end of the following February – is not known, but he received a payment from King James I (1566-1625) and was expected to return in eight months. He was recorded soon afterwards as living in Rome in the same house as George Gage (c. 1582-1632), an ‘Anglo-Catholic’ employed by the British crown to advance negotiations for the prince of Wales’s ‘Spanish match’ at the papal court.5
In Italy, Van Dyck was active in Rome, Venice, Genoa and Palermo.6 He re-established himself in 1627 in Antwerp, and was appointed court painter to the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, the Archduchess Isabella (1566-1633); his practice extended to The Hague whence he was summoned on two occasions.
By the summer of 1632, Van Dyck had settled in London; he was knighted by King Charles I (1600-1649) and then granted an annual pension as a retainer. But in the spring of 1634, he was in Antwerp and by the end of the year he was living in Brussels. By March 1635 he had returned to London and was established in a studio, specially converted by the architect Inigo Jones (1573-1652), on the Thames at Blackfriars. In great demand, not only by the king as a portrait painter, Van Dyck mixed with members of the court and married in 1640 Mary Ruthven, who was of a Scots noble family. In the autumn of 1640 he was in Antwerp, and early in 1641 briefly in Paris whence he returned hoping to gain the patronage of King Louis XIII (1601-1643) and Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642). There in November, he wrote that he was very unwell; back in London with his wife for her lying-in, he died shortly after the birth of his daughter, Justiniana.
References
S.J. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey, Anthony van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven (Conn.)/London 2004, pp. 1-12
Entry
Exceptionally accepted by Larsen as autograph,7 the present picture is a fluently executed copy after Anthony van Dyck’s prototype in the Bildergalerie, Schloss Sanssouci.8 This was painted during Van Dyck’s first Antwerp period (c. 1613-20), perhaps towards its end, as De Poorter has proposed. The primed reverse of the oak support of the Rijksmuseum painting results from a typical Antwerp practice of the time (see under SK-A-590), and this copy could have been painted not long after the prototype and perhaps in Van Dyck’s studio. The dendrochronological dating of the support makes this latter supposition only a possibility.
The original measurements of the Sanssouci painting, as given by De Poorter, are practically the same as those of the Rijksmuseum copy. She believes that Christ in the former was ‘in an initial stage’ depicted ‘without hands and globe’. If such was indeed the case, the copy would have been made after the globe and hand had been added but before the prototype received its substantial enlargements.
De Poorter suggests that Van Dyck in devising the composition may have been influenced by Rubens’s (1577-1640) lost portrayals of Christ and the Virgin.9 Another source of inspiration (and not mutually exclusive) may well have been Titian’s (c. 1488-1576) Christ Blessing (State Hermitage Museum) or a version of it.10
The composition was later engraved by Schelte Adamsz Bolswert (1584/1588-1659), and the print published by Gillis Hendrickx (active from c. 1645).11 The field differs, as do the placement of the fingers and configuration of the eyes. The print has the rubric Salvator Mundi (Saviour of the World). Christ is shown in the act of blessing, while his left hand rests on the globe of the world.
Gregory Martin, 2022
Literature
De Poorter in S.J. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey, Anthony van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven (Conn.)/London 2004, under no. I.49 (wrongly as on canvas)
Collection catalogues
1905, p. 115, no. 862a (as probably a copy after Van Dyck); 1976, p. 211, no. A 1224 (as after Van Dyck)
Citation
G. Martin, 2022, 'after Anthony van Dyck, Christ as Saviour of the World, c. 1620 - c. 1630', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8294
(accessed 28 December 2024 17:23:58).