Exhibit of the week Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture

Antoon Van Dyck was a true child prodigy, said John Zeaman in the Bergen County, N.J., Record. Born in 1599 to a family of Antwerp merchants, the painter was just 10 when he was apprenticed to a Flemish master, and by his mid-teens he was working as chief assistant to Peter Paul Rubens. The boy’s preternatural talent can be glimpsed in a 1613 self-portrait in which the babyfaced artist peers over his shoulder through tousled red locks, his large eyes “taking in everything.” The painting—part of the Frick Collection’s terrific new exhibition— bears the artist’s proud inscription: “Antoon Van Dyck made this, at the age of 14.” By 21, Van Dyck was “well on his way to becoming the most sought-after portrait painter in Europe.” He received commissions from Italian nobles and Vatican cardinals before accepting a 1632 invitation to serve as court painter to England’s King Charles I. “Many prodigies fail to live up to their promise,” but not Van Dyck. He lived only to age 42, but he was “a wunderkind whose star never faded.”

The 100 paintings in this show suggest Van Dyck “could do anything he wished to with paint,” said Karen Wilkin in The Wall Street Journal. In a pair of circa 1620 pendant portraits of Flemish painter Frans Snyders and his wife, Van Dyck’s sensitive characterizations are nearly matched by his exquisite renderings of lace and linen. A dazzling 1623 portrait of Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio, never before seen in the U.S., represents a highlight of Van Dyck’s six-year Italian period. “A miracle of sumptuous red silk and deep red velvet, the painting suggests a fleeting moment of alert response, as the cardinal looks up from reading a letter.” Further on hangs a “spectacular” group of the works for which the artist is best known: portrayals of the court and family of Charles I. Yet as impressive as Van Dyck’s paintings are, his drawings in this show might be more revealing. You get a sense of the artist at work, scrutinizing how drapery falls or a figure stands, then recording his observations with “rapid, urgent strokes” of black chalk

You’ll notice that the faces in most of the sketches are left blank, said Bendor Grosvenor in the Financial Times. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Van Dyck preferred to paint from life, rather than from a study, when setting a subject’s likeness on canvas. “Here we come to the heart of why he was such a good portraitist”: Even otherwise great painters who create portraits from studies tend to express their own personality more forcefully than those of their subjects. “Rubens’ portraits, for example, can border on caricature, bursting as they do with the artist’s humor and painterly brio.” Van Dyck, by contrast, never repeated himself. At the Frick show, “we get the impression with each portrait that we are meeting someone new, a fresh face and a fresh character.”