Object data
oil on panel
support: height 25.7 cm × width 20.2 cm
outer size: depth 5 cm (support incl. frame)
Anthony van Dyck (after)
c. 1630 - c. 1650
oil on panel
support: height 25.7 cm × width 20.2 cm
outer size: depth 5 cm (support incl. frame)
…; sale, Warnar Wreesman Borghartzoon (c. 1748-1814, Amsterdam), Amsterdam (P. van der Schley et al.), 11 April 1816, no. 54 (‘Het Pourtret van de grooten P.P. Rubbens, halverlijf. Meesterlijk en van de beste van deze Meester, op. P. h.10, br. 7.1/2 duimen [26.5 x 19.6 cm] door A. van Dyk’), with SK-A-2319 (no. 55), fl. 275, to the dealer Jeronimo de Vries for Lucretia Johanna van Winter (1785-1845), Amsterdam;1 her husband Jonkheer Hendrik Six van Hillegom (1790-1847), Amsterdam; their sons Jonkheer Jan Pieter Six van Hillegom (1824-99) and Jonkheer Pieter Hendrik Six van Vromade (1827-1905); from the latter’s heirs, with 37 other pictures, fl. 751,000, with a contribution from the Rembrandt Society of fl. 200,000, to the Dutch Government, 1907; presented to the museum, with SK-A-2319, 1908; on loan to the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, 1999-2011
Object number: SK-A-2318
Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt
Copyright: Public domain
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.2
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.3
In Italy, Van Dyck was active in Rome, Venice, Genoa and Palermo.4 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
This portrait of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640; for a biography of whom see e.g. SK-A-346) was acquired with a portrait of the jurist and historian Jan Caspar Gevaerts (1593-1666; SK-A-2319) for the prestigious Van Winter collection as the work of Anthony van Dyck. Later both were sold as such to the Dutch government in 1907, and catalogued by the museum as autograph until 1926, and in the case of SK-A-2319 until 1934, when the present painting was omitted from the catalogue. Evers in 1944 attributed the present work to Van Dyck,5 but Burchard rejected the attribution nine years later,6 and recently Vey has followed other authorities by describing it as a copy.7
The work is to be associated with the grisaille oil sketches executed by Van Dyck in preparation for his Iconography, a series of etched and engraved portraits of famous personages, mostly contemporary. The earliest reference to such a set of prints occurs in March 1632.8 The prints were preceded by, at the least, ad vivum drawings (or drawn copies of likenesses) and oil-sketches in grisaille, the latter on a scale similar to the eventual print. The purpose of the oil sketches in the process is not certain – on the rare occasion when Van Dyck etched a portrait himself none seems to have been executed – but they must have been intended to act as a guide for the engraver.
The great majority of the extant grisailles – most of which are thought to be autograph – is in the collection of the duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry at Boughton House, Northamptonshire. This group has a provenance that goes back to the artist Sir Peter Lely (1618-1680), but contains some replicas, or near replicas, and is uneven in quality.9 The museum picture closely connects with (but is larger than) the design for the portrait of Rubens at Boughton, which has been claimed to be the working grisaille10 executed in the process of creating the print.11 But differences between these two and some clumsy passages – especially in the ruff – suggest that the Buccleuch sketch may itself be a copy and not a prototype from which the print was made.
It is generally agreed that the museum picture is a copy of the Buccleuch sketch; the 1976 museum catalogue suggested it was made in Van Dyck’s studio, and Luijten has more recently claimed that the original grisailles were kept by Van Dyck and that he ‘had his pupils copy them’.12 Such a circumstance would be a repetition of what was recollected as having happened with the Apostle series13 during Van Dyck’s first Antwerp period (c. 1613-1620) and would explain the large number of extant copies of the grisaille sketches. Vey has implicitly rejected this theory by referring to ‘a number of able painters [in Antwerp and Brussels] who could translate a Van Dyck drawing or painting into a grisaille … It goes pretty much without saying that their grisailles would have subsequently found their way into Van Dyck’s workshop stock.’14
The museum picture is not a grisaille, but rather is executed in shades of brown, and although Vey has described all the Boughton sketches as grisailles, Luijten has stated that some sketches – perhaps not those that were connected with the process of making the prints – were ‘composed in brown or greenish hues’.15 This work was executed with no underdrawing in brunaille. The weak handling of the Rijksmuseum painting suggests quite a distance from Van Dyck or his studio, if the latter did indeed make such copies. It is quite possible that this brunaille was painted after, but not long after, Van Dyck’s death, but precisely when is impossible to estimate. The hand seems not the same as that which executed the Gevaerts portrait (SK-A-2319). Klein has estimated that the oak support (from the German/Netherlandish region) would have been ready for use ‘possibly from 1630’, while ‘more plausible’ would be a date from 1640.16
The prototype from which Paul Pontius (1603-1658) made his engraving for the Iconography would have been executed during Van Dyck’s ‘second’ Antwerp period (c. 1627-1632/1634), around 1630. Van Dyck must have known Rubens’s appearance well from early in his career and we know that they had encountered one another17 in the early summer of 1628, so it is curious that (as has been remarked) Van Dyck endowed his sitter with a thinning head of hair, for Rubens was already bald by the middle of the second decade.18 Is it possible that Van Dyck was unaware of this, because Rubens may have remained covered (i.e. did not remove his hat) when they met?
Vey elaborated Liedtke’s19 proposal by suggesting that the sitter’s ‘forward leaning pose’ was inspired by Rubens’s own Self-Portrait in the Rubenshuis.20
Gregory Martin, 2022
Vey 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. III.161
1908, p. 417, no. 857a (as by Van Dyck); 1976, p. 209, no. A 2318 (as Studio of Van Dyck).
G. Martin, 2022, 'after Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), c. 1630 - c. 1650', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8290
(accessed 26 November 2024 00:31:36).