Van Dyck

Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) is among the greatest portrait painters of all time. The 1990s opened and closed with major exhibitions devoted to his work and this is a catalogue raisonne of his painted oeuvre. A native of Antwerp, Van Dyck also lived and worked for long periods in Italy and England, where his brief, productive life ended. He is best known for his work at the court of Charles I of England and his images of Charles and his Queen, Henrietta Maria, combine imperial tradition with a lyricism that is unique. The full-length portraits of aristocrats in the Caroline court and in Genoa, Antwerp, Brussels and The Hague set a standard for elegance, grandeur and personal insight that influenced the history of Western portraiture into the 20th century in the work of John Singer Sargent. Like Titian, whom he admired and whose artistic legacy he transformed and handed on, Van Dyck was as gifted with religious and mythological subjects as he was with portraits. He pioneered means of expressing personal piety and intimacy that would dominate later 17th-and 18th-century religious art throughout Catholic Europe. This manual includes a reproduction of every known authentic painting by the artist, the provenance and the significant facts and literature on each. The catalogue raisonne is a collaboration and an international team has produced this study of an international artist.