The Earl of Arundel and the English king had, for some time, been trying to persuade Van Dyck to return to England, and finally, in 1632, they were successful. The great Flemish artist was received with all the honors that could be accorded to the ambassador of a foreign court. A fine residence, the property of the sovereign, was given to him in London (Blackfriar's dis trict) and the. royal favor went so far as to as sign him apartments in the royal palace of Eltham, and to appoint him painter in ordinary to the royal household, with a pension of #200 a year, then a large sum of money. Thus en couraged to do his best, honored with the high esteem of the English sovereign and his consort and praised by the British nobility led by the Earl of Arundel, Van Dyck now began the most notable of his many notable series of portraits. These include numerous portraits of the king, the queen and their children. Van Dyck seems to have been very happy and to have put into his work all his love of art, his cultured imagi nation and the wonderful art knowledge and technique he had acquired from constant con tact with the paintings of schools so far apart as the Netherlands and Italy.
In 1634 Van Dyck returned to Antwerp where he remained actively at work for over two years. There he painted many notables and produced some of his most characteristic groups, now among the glories of Flemish achievements in art. From 1636 to 1640 he was again back in England, where he busied him self painting portraits for most of the notable personages of the court, so that there are liter ally scores of fine Van Dyck portraits scattered throughout the palaces of the British nobility. So popular was Van Dyck,. at this period of his career, that it was a physical impossibility for him to have executed all the pressing commis sions given him. The result is that he very often simply sketched his subject, painted the features and left the execution of the rest of the picture to skilled pupils and followers of his school. He invariably, however, retouched this pupils' work, where he found it not to his fine artistic taste. In 1641 Van Dyck went to Paris where he hoped to get a commission to decorate the Louvre for which he had conceived an elaborate plan; out he was disappointed. This probably increased his already poor health and he died the following year at a compara tively young age, but easily the foremost name in art of his latter years.
Van Dyck is par excellence the ideal por trait painter. While remaining true always to his subject, he had the power of casting round it a glamor which lent an air of distinction to his portraits of princes of the State and Church, of sovereigns and nobles. By instinct he was himself an aristocrat and the position he main tained as the autocrat of his profession in creased this inborn tendency and gave him a very broad and deep interest in the true artistic interpretation of the men of noble family and high estate that he may be said to have spent his life transferring to canvas. His portraits of the unfortunate Stuart, Charles I of Eng land and the cavaliers who so strenuously sup ported his cause, have done more to immortalize them and to maintain an interest in and a sympathy for them than any one other agency. Through them we form a definite visual picture of the.court of Charles I and of the upper-class society of his day, such as we are unable to vis ualize of any previous period in English history. His influence upon English art, and especially upon portrait painting, was greater and more lasting than that of any previous painter. Yet so peculiarly his own was his style of painting and so consummate was his art that while he had hundreds of imitators, many coworkers and numerous pupils, he may be said to have created no school. This is because his supreme excellences is to be found in his mystical poetic touch, his idealization and his mingling of the broad, striking dramatic realism of the Flemish painters, generally translated into action and the softening, refining imaginative, poetic tem perament of the South. No artist could imitate
Van Dyck as Van Dyck constantly imitated, in such a realistic manner, the work of his first great master, Rubens, and the notable painters of the Italy of his day. This is because Van Dyck, Janus-like, was constantly presenting two faces, one looking toward the long past, bold, dramatic and realistic influences of his youth; and the other following the refining, softening and ennobling principles of the southern lands that were rapidly making of Italy the home of modern, as she had long been, one of the two great centres of ancient art. To outline the many existing works of art from the brush of Van Dyck would require catalogue space greater than the necessary limits of this article. His paintings, and especially his portraits, are to be found in every country of Europe and numerous examples exist in the United States and Latin America. Among his notable works, however, are 'Jacobus de Wael and his
(Munich), his brilliant portraits of Genoese nobility, of Charles I, king of England and of 'Queen
'Cardinal Bentivoglio> (Rome) ; 'Portrait of A Lady and a Child'. (Morgan Collection, Metropolitan Museum, New York City) ; 'Philip of Savoy, Viceroy of Sicily' (Turin). Other portraits of members of the same noble family, most of which are still in Turin; 'Madonna del Rosario' (very fa mous, in the Oratorio del Santissimo Rosario, Palermo) ; 'Raising of the Brazen Serpent> (Madrid) ;
Bibliography.— Carpenter, VV. H., 'Pictorial Notices, Consisting of a Memoir of Sir An thony Van Dyck with a Descriptive Catalogue of the Etchings Executed by Hi& (London 1844) ; Cust, L., (Anthony Van Dyck' (London 1900) ; Fierens-Gevaert, 'Van Dyck' (1912) ; Guiffrey, J., 'Antoine Van Dyck' (Paris 1882) ; Head, P. R., 'Van Dyck' (London 1887) ; Heinemann, W., • (Engravings of Van Dyck' (London 1911); Hind, A. M., 'Van Dyck's Etchings' (Boston 1915) ; Knackfuss, E., 'Van Dyck' (Bielefeld 1896) ; Lemcke, C., 'A. Van Dyck' (Vol. 1, Kunst and Kiinstler, Leipzig 1877); Michiels, A., (Antoine Van Dyck et ses &eves) (Paris 1881) ; Newbolt, F., 'Etch ings of Van Dyck' (London 1906) ; Rooses, M., 'Chefs d'ceuvres d'Antoine Van Dyck' (Antwerp 1901); 'Antoine Van Dyck' (Paris 1902) ; Schaeffer, 'Paintings of Van Dyck Illustrated' (Stuttgart 1909) ; Smith, A., 'A Catalogue Raisonne of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters' (Part III, London 1841) ; Stephens, F. G., 'Catalogue of the Exhibition of the Works of Sir A. Van Dyck' (London 1887) ; 'Biography of Van Dyck' (New York 1905); Szwykowski, A., 'Van Dyck's Bildnisse bekannter Personen> (Leipzig 1858) ; Wibiral, F., (L'Iconographie d' A. Van Dyck d'apres les recherches de H. Weber' (Leipzig 1877); Woltmann and Woer mann, 'Geschichte der Malerei' (Vol. III, Leipzig 1886).