Pictures Every Child Should Know / A Selection of the World's Art Masterpieces for Young People

by Mary Schell Hoke Bacon

However, an annual pension from the King of England seems to have made travelling possible to this fine gentleman of lace ruffles, pale face, and lady-like ways.

There is an entry about him on the royal account book of "Special service ... performed for His Majesty." Also "Antonio Van Dyck, gent., His Majesty's servant, is allowed to travaile 8 months, he havinge obtayneid his Majesty's leave in that behalf, as was signified to the E. of Arundel." Certainly by that time Van Dyck had become a truly great portrait painter; not the greatest, because every picture showed the same characteristics in its subject--elegance, fine clothes, languid manners, without force of great truth or any excellent moral quality to distinguish one from another. Nevertheless, the kind of painting that he did, he did better than anyone else had ever done, or probably ever will do.

While in England he painted all the royalties and many aristocrats, and wherever he went he was always painting pictures of himself.

He travelled about a good deal, always painting people of the same class--kings and queens and fine folk, and painting them pretty nearly all alike.

When he went to Italy he was everywhere received as a great painter, but while artists agreed that his work was excellent he was not much liked by them, and many tales are told about that journey which are interesting, if not entirely true. Van Dyck was the sort of man about whom tales would be made up. One, however, sounds true. It is said that he fell in love--which of course he was always doing--with a beautiful country girl, and that for love of her he painted an altar piece into which he put himself, seated on the great gray horse which Rubens had given him. That picture is in St. Martin's Church at Saventhem, near Brussels, but although one is inclined to believe this story because it was quite the sort of thing which might be expected of Van Dyck, even this is not true, because the painting was done long after the artist had made his Italian journey, and it was commissioned by a gentleman living at Saventhem, whose daughter Van Dyck undoubtedly liked pretty well; but he made the picture for money, not for love.

While he was in Italy he lived with a cardinal, and painted languid pictures of sacred subjects, which were far from being his best work. The best that he did was in portraiture. Distinguished though he was, he did not have a very good time in Italy, because he would not join the artists who worked there, nor associate with them in the least, and naturally this made him disliked.

We see a good many portraits painted by Van Dyck, of persons mounted upon or standing beside the gray horse, and these were painted about the time of that Italian journey. He used the Rubens horse in many paintings.

Of all the people with whom he painted, he most valued the knowledge he got from a blind woman painter of Sicily, called Sofonisba Anguisciola, and he often said that he had learned more from a blind woman than from all the open-eyed men he ever knew. This woman artist was over ninety years old at the time he learned from her.

While he was in Italy the plague broke out, and Van Dyck fled for his life, leaving an unfinished picture behind him, one ordered by the English king, the subject being Rinaldo and Armida, which had gained for the artist his knighthood pension.

It is said that during his first year in England he painted the king and queen twelve times. He had an extraordinary record for industry, and painted very quickly, as he had need to do, because it took a great deal of money to buy the sort of things Van Dyck liked--fine laces and velvets, perfumes and satins. His plan was to sketch his subject first on gray paper with black and white chalk, and after that he gave the sketch to an assistant who increased it to the size he wished to paint. The next step was to set his painter to work upon the clothing of his figures. This was painted in roughly, together with background and any architectural effect Van Dyck wanted. After this the artist himself sat down and in three or four sittings, of not more than an hour each, he was able to finish a picture worth to-day thousands of dollars.