Van Dyck had forty pounds for a half, and sixty pounds for a whole-length picture;—for a large piece of the King, Queen, and their children, he had a hundred pounds. For the Wilton family picture he had five hundred and twenty-five pounds. But Van Dyck soon impaired his fortune. He was not content with having a country-house at Eltham in Kent, where he spent a portion of each summer; he would emulate in his expenditure the most spendthrift noble of that reign. 'He always went magnificently dressed, and had a numerous and gallant equipage, and kept so good a table in his apartment that few princes were more visited and better served.' His marriage was not calculated to teach him moderation. In his thirty-ninth year the King gave him the hand of Marie Ruthven, who was nearly related to the unhappy Earl of Gowrie. She was his niece, her father having been the scarcely less unhappy younger brother Patrick, a physician, who, apprehended when a young man on the charge of being concerned in the treason of his elder brothers, spent his manhood in the Tower. He was kept a prisoner there from 1584 to 1619, nearly forty years, and was only released in his age and infirmity when his mind was giving way. Patrick Ruthven's infant daughter had been adopted, either through charity or perversity, by Anne of Denmark, and brought up first at the court of Anne, and afterwards at that of Henrietta Maria. The assertion that Marie Ruthven was a very beautiful woman has been contradicted. It was said that 'she was bestowed in marriage on Sir Antony Van Dyck as much to humble further the already humbled and still detested family of Ruthven, as to honour the painter; but this does not seem consistent with King Charles's known favour for Van Dyck. Yet such a view might have been entertained by Marie Ruthven herself, who, according to tradition, held herself degraded by the marriage, and never forgave the degradation. She was not a loving wife to a man who could hardly have been a very loving or loyal husband. And certainly the marriage did not unite the painter closer to the king.
With his professional industry, Van Dyck combined an equally unquenchable love of pleasure, which, with his luxurious and sedentary habits, induced paroxysms of gout, from which Rubens also suffered severely. This must have ultimately disqualified him for good work, and when his debts accumulated in greater proportion even than his receipts, in place of having recourse, like Rubens, to his painting-room, Van Dyck tried a shorter road to get rich, by following the idle example of Sir Kenelm Digby in his pursuit of alchemy and the philosopher's stone.
In the year of his marriage, Van Dyck re-visited Flanders, in company with his wife, and then repaired to France, it is understood with the intention of settling there. He was instigated to the step by his wife, and his own ambition of rivalling Rubens' triumphs at the Luxembourg; but the preference which the French gave to the works of their countryman, Nicolas Poussin, roused his latent jealousy, and so mortified him as to induce him to renounce his intention. He determined to return to England, and was, to his credit, confirmed in his resolution by the threatening civil war which was to shake his royal master's throne to the foundation, rather than deterred from it.
Again in England, Van Dyck employed Sir Kenelm Digby to make an offer on the painter's part that for eight hundred pounds he would paint the history, and a procession of the Knights of the Garter on the walls of the Knights' banqueting-room at Whitehall—that palace which was to have surpassed the Louvre, the Tuileries, and the Escurial, and from one of the windows of which Charles stepped out on his scaffold. But the proposal was rejected, and immediately afterwards the civil war broke out, and was speedily followed by the death of Van Dyck, about a year after his marriage, when he was a little over forty years old, at Blackfriars, in 1641. He was buried in old St Paul's, near the tomb of John of Gaunt. His daughter, Justiniana, was born a short time—some say only eight days—before her father died, and was baptized on the day of his death. Van Dyck left effects and sums due to him to the amount of twenty thousand pounds; but the greater part of the debts were found beyond recovery at the close of the civil war. His daughter grew up, and married a Mr Stepney, 'who rode in King Charles's life guards.' His widow re-married; her second husband was a Welsh knight.
Van Dyck's character was one of those that are made of very contradictory elements. He was actuated by opposite motives which are hard to analyze, and which in their instability have within themselves, whatever their outward advantages, the doom of failure in the highest excellence. He was a proud man, dissatisfied both with himself and his calling, resenting, with less reason than Hans Holbein showed, that he should be condemned to portrait painting, yet by no means undervaluing or slurring over his work. He 'would detain the persons who sat to him to dinner for an opportunity of studying their countenances and re-touching their pictures,' 'would have a sitter, sitting to him seven entire days, mornings and evenings, and would not once let the man see the picture till it pleased the painter.' Van Dyck appears to have been a man with the possibilities in him of greater things than he attained, possibilities which were baffled by his weakness and self-indulgence, leaving him with such a sense of this as spoiled his greatest successes.
I have the varying indications of two pictures of Van Dyck from which to get an impression of his personal appearance. The first picture is that of a youthful face, soft, smiling, with dark eyes, finely-formed nose, a slightly open mouth, having a full-cleft under lip, the hair profuse and slightly curled, but short, and no beard or moustache. The dress is an open doublet, without a collar, a lace cravat, and one arm half bare. The second is the picture of Van Dyck in the Louvre, which is judged the best likeness of the painter. In this his person is slender, his complexion fair, his eyes grey, his hair chestnut brown, his beard and whiskers red. He wears a vest of green velvet, with a plain collar.
In his art, Van Dyck, with something of the glow of Rubens, and with a delicacy peculiarly his own, was decidedly inferior to his great master, both in power and in fertility of genius. In the superficial refinement which was so essential a part of Van Dyck, he had the capacity of conferring on his sitters a reflection of his own outward stateliness and grace. When he painted at his best his portraits were solid, true, and masterly, but he has been reproached with sacrificing truth to the refining process which he practised. Even in the case of Charles I., whose portraits are our most familiar examples of Van Dyck, and who thus lives in the imagination of most people as the very personification of a noble and handsome cavalier, there have not been wanting critics who have maintained that Charles,—the son of a plain uncouth father, and of a mother rather floridly buxom than delicately handsome, and who was in his childhood a sickly rickety child,—was by no means so well endowed in the matter of manly beauty as we have supposed. These students of old gossip and close investigation, have alleged that Charles was long and lanky, after he had ceased to be Baby Charles; that his nose was too large, and, alas! apt to redden; that his eyes were vacillating; and his mouth, the loosely hung mouth of a man who begins by being irresolute, and ends by being obstinate. [45] Again, in the hands of a sitter, which Van Dyck was supposed to paint with special care and elegance, it has been argued that he copied always the same hand, probably his own, in ignorance, or in defiance of the fact that hands have nearly as much and as varying character as a painter can discover in faces. Though Van Dyck painted many beautiful women, he did not excel in rendering them beautiful on canvas, so that succeeding generations, in gazing on Van Dyck's versions of Venitia, Lady Digby, and Dorothy Sydney—Waller's Sacharissa,—have wondered how Sir Kenelm, Waller, and their contemporaries, could find these ladies so beautiful.
Van Dyck certainly owed something of the charm of his pictures to the dress of the period, with regard to which he received this credit that 'Van Dyck was the first painter who e'er put ladies' dress into a careless romance.' But in reality never was costume better suited for a painter like Van Dyck. The hair in the men was allowed to flow to the shoulders or gathered in a love knot, while the whiskers and beard formed a point. In the women the hair was crisped in curls round the face. The ruff in men and women had yielded to the broad, rich, falling collar, with deep scallops of point lace. Vest and cloak were of the richest velvet or satin, or else, on the breaking out of the civil war, men appeared in armour. The man's hat was broad and flapping, usually turned up at one side, and having an ostrich feather in the band; his long wide boots were of Spanish leather, and he wore gauntlet gloves, and rich ruffles at his wrists. The women wore hoods and mantles, short bodices, ample trains, and wide sleeves terminating in loose ruffles at the elbow, which left half of the arm bare. Pearl necklaces and bracelets, round feather fans, and 'knots of flowers,' were the almost universal ornaments of women. Another ornament of both men and women, which belonged to the day, and was very common in the quarters I have been referring to, was a miniature enclosed in a small case of ivory or ebony, carved like a rose, and worn on the left side in token of betrothal. [46] Van Dyck, along with the appreciation of black draperies which he held in common with Rubens, was specially fond of painting white or blue satin. He is said to have used a brown preparation of pounded peach-stones for glazing the hair in his pictures.
In the end, with all the aids that critics may have given him, and all the faults they may find in him, Van Dyck was a great, and in the main an earnest portrait painter. Perhaps 'Charles in white satin, just descended from his horse,' is the best of the single portraits which were held to be Van Dyck's forte.
I must try to give my readers some idea of Van Dyck's 'Wilton Family.' It has been so praised, that some have said 'it might have been covered with gold as a price to obtain it;' on the other hand, it has not escaped censure. One critic asserts that there is no common action uniting the figures, and that the faces are so different in complexion—one yellow-faced boy appearing either jaundiced or burnt by a tropical sun, that the family might have lived in different climates.