London,

Van Dyck And Britain

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Tate Britain
Millbank, SW1P 4RG

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Description: Work spanning the 18th-century painter's career.

Phone: 0207887 8888
Website: www.tate.org.uk/britain
Email: visiting.britain@tate.org.uk

Trains: Tube: Pimlico/Vauxhall/Westminster , Tube / Bus: 2, 3, 36, 87 (formerly 77A), 88, 159, 185, 436, 507, C10

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Van Dyck the misunderstood

 

One man and his dog: in Van Dyck’s Duke of Lennox, emotion is wonderfully embodied in the hound, rather than his master

Family man: Charles I and Henrietta-Maria with their first two children, one of Van Dyck’s failures, its figures dwarfed and separate

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Ten years ago, the Royal Academy celebrated the fourth centenary of Van Dyck’s birth with an exhibition that in 105 examples covered every aspect of his working life as a painter. That distillation from a thousand pictures, mostly portraits, that range from the pure authority of his own hand to that of the most crass assistant in his studio making copies simultaneously with the original gave us the whole life and the whole man, from his brilliant promise as the best pupil Rubens ever had, to his succession as that great inventor’s rival under the patronage of Italian aristocrats, on to his appointment in July 1632 to King Charles I and Henrietta Maria as their “principal’s Paynter in ordinary” until his death in Blackfriars in December 1641, three months short of his 43rd birthday. It was an exhibition that proved “perhaps, that Van Dyck was a far better painter than we grudgingly allow”.

Perhaps. Now, at Tate Britain, we have another Van Dyck exhibition, this time devoted only to his work in England, offering much support for the misgiving implied in that small word, perhaps. Repeatedly Van Dyck and Britain demonstrates how bad a painter he could be and swamps the few masterpieces with paintings that are curate’s eggs, flawed in drawing and construction, more than faintly ridiculous in conception, and by workshop hacks as much as by himself. And why call it Van Dyck and Britain instead of Van Dyck and England? He was attached to the English court, his duties as a courtier and painter were carried out in London and any influences that he absorbed here and traditions of portraiture that he chose to respect were those of earlier painters in London and the court. Scotland was another country and the courtly Stuarts were divorced from it; Britain did not exist.

What then is the purpose of this hotch-potch demonstration of his long, posthumous and diminishing impact on the genre? It begins with a handful of ­examples of portraiture in England before Van Dyck’s first sojourn here for five months in the winter of 1620-21, performing some now unknown special service for King James I. They range from the primitive absurdity of Robert Peake’s Prince Henry of 1603 (an ­heraldic miniature writ two metres tall), to the modest competence of James I, by Daniel Mytens, uninventively conforming to a formula that lasted from Raphael’s Julius II to Velázquez’s ­Innocent X. The exhibition then trawls through Van Dyck’s work of those months and immediately after, when he was 21 or so, the second English period of almost two years from June 1632 to the spring of 1634, and then the final years from March 1635 until his death — though these last were much interrupted by European travel.

These discontinuities, not represented by the exhibition, ensure that we see nothing that communicates the quality of Van Dyck’s finest work executed in Flanders and Italy, and that his painterly response to Rubens as the most profound and formative influence before he settled here, as well as to the Italian Renaissance artists whose work affected or briefly diverted his development, is all but invisible. The only Rubensian picture on view is The Continence of Scipio with all Van Dyck’s then customary faults of action floating but unanchored, limbs disappearing without logic into vague and inflated drapery, and the unstable rough and tumble of irrelevant participants and paraphernalia. A smaller preparatory version, sketchy and impulsive, silvery in tone, exquisite in touch, from which this monstrosity was developed, was discovered in the early 1960s but has since disappeared.

The exhibition drags to a close with a survey of English portrait painters who in the 17th century fell under Van Dyck’s sway, the worst of and most ridiculous of them John Hayls, whose Lady and a Boy with Pan is a mercifully rare survival; after continuing the argument for his supremacy with evidence of an à la mode revival of sham Dyckian ideas in the portraiture of Hudson, Gainsborough and Reynolds, it reaches its weary end with swagger portraits by Sargent and de Laszlo, on whom he was far from a dominant ­influence, if an influence at all.

I felt that I had been subjected to a plodding tutorial by thoroughly dull minds, to essays written by students with access to Wikipedia, and to the connoisseurship of eyes less accustomed to looking at paintings than to examining reproductions. I could identify neither new research nor a fresh approach to this dry as dust material. To those who organised this exhibition I ask: “Where do you think we have been for the past half century?” — and I ask it for the sake of my peers and the tutors who taught me, particularly Ellis Waterhouse (National Gallery and Barber Institute) of whom the Burlington Magazine asked 40 years ago and with suitable rhetoric: “How much of his learning lies buried … how much of his knowledge lies unused?” Ellis, having literally exhumed the forgotten face-painters (the then word for them) of Van Dyck’s years in England and his distant and etiolated derivatives in the 18th century, had the wit and connoisseurship to grow impatient with these trivial and minor figures and in later life strove to abandon them. His work on this backwater of art history was an act of piety, an assiduous response to the necessary drudgery of this branch of academe, and it need not have been repeated. It should remain the stuff of dull tutorials, for it is not the stuff of thrilling exhibitions.

From it lay visitors will gain so misleadingly lopsided a view of Van Dyck that I must urge those who know nothing else of him to make an immediate excursion to the National Gallery, there to see something of his connection with Rubens and, particularly, his portraits of The Balbi Children, his friend the Abbot Scaglia, and of George Gage, an Englishman whom he met in Italy and whom he painted in a composition strange and active enough to remind us of Lorenzo Lotto. They should go too to the Queen’s Gallery where, until 26 April, an extraordinarily private ­Portrait of Van Dyck by Rubens is on view, together with canvases that demonstrate Van Dyck’s response to Titian. In Kenwood a portrait of Henrietta of Lorraine, painted in Brussels in 1634, makes the point that the standing formula of Van Dyck’s full-length portrayal of standing females was established before he settled in London, and his portrait of James Stuart in shirt-sleeves is an astonishingly informal and personal account of the young Duke of Richmond and Lennox.

In Dulwich, there are more canvases by Van Dyck, Rubensian, Italianate and English, including the startling Lady Digby on her Deathbed.

This local pilgrimage performed, the enthusiast will have seen three versions of the mawkish Infant Christ with the Infant Baptist, of which that at Tate Britain claims primacy, though in my view, “much spoiled”, according to a very early source, and “indifferently repaired”, it is too weak and fudged to be accepted as original.

The would-be grandest exhibit at Millbank is Van Dyck’s portrait of Charles I and Henrietta-Maria with their first two children, “The Greate Peece” of 1632 in which the painter made not only a political statement about the security of the Stuart monarchy, but a proud advertisement for himself. For all its bombast it is a failure. In this three-metre canvas the figures are dwarfed by the incoherent accretion of landscape, curtains, a giant column and other elements that restrict them to a shallow stage, tiny and awkward on chairs of state that are too high for little legs; no matter what Van Dyck has done to tie the family together with gesture, glance and lapdog, the king and queen remain apart — a feature observed by early copyists who, disturbed by the great discrepancy in the size of their heads, reproduced its halves as separate portraits. No one, as far as I know, has identified the evening landscape; could it be, I wonder, the jumble of old building that constituted Whitehall Palace?

Charles I on Horseback, painted the following year and even larger, is a far more successful composition that we should imagine hanging on the far end wall of a long room; adapted from a widely influential portrait by Rubens, the small figure is anchored in and supported by the baroque flummery that is so ill-used in the Great Piece — it is a moment’s pause in which the eye of the king catches the eye of the spectator before the tumble of curtain and the stride ofhis riding-master urge him on. It is an example of Van Dyck’s rare ­success with figures moving towards the spectator from the inner depths of the picture’s space. To gauge how awkward he could be with such a movement, consider The Earl of Denbigh, in pink pyjamas hunting a parrot, accompanied by an Indian page to enhance the exotic mood, in which the shallow charms of incongruity are overwhelmed by the absurd implausibility of Denbigh’s stance and stride.

Consider, too, his hands, the right as petite as a woman’s, the left as large as a labourer’s. Then look at other hands in other portraits, too often affected, too rarely affecting, occasionally gross.

For the best of Van Dyck’s English portraits, the visitor must turn to ­Thomas Wentworth, a depiction as profound in head and hound as any by Velázquez, his immediate contemporary, though the awkwardness of the pose betrays the fundamental weakness of Van Dyck’s understanding of the figure and coherence is lost in the empty confusions of the armour. The similar full-length of James Stuart, Duke of Lennox, painted two or three years earlier in 1633, is more felicitously managed but the same weakness is apparent; the emotional level, however, is wonderfully embodied in the great dog rather than the duke, and pressing against him, as dogs do, the pressure lends logic to the thrust of his master’s pose.

What could happen when Van Dyck was not in the least interested in his sitters is demonstrated by the double portrait of the duke’s adolescent brothers, Lords John and Bernard, unlovely slack-mouthed raw-boned striplings on the brink of manhood, showing every mark of incestuous in-breeding. They are skilfully entwined in a composition that offers every possible variation of the strut and swagger, the limp wrist and ballet boy’s toe, the sway that runs through baroque sculpture and the hand-on-hip contrapposto of the antique Roman emperor. A third brother, closer in age to the duke, Lord George Stuart, we are given as a fond and foolish shepherd, moon-faced and twinkle-toed, sans dog and with not a sheep in sight. Such images as these make Roundheads of us all.

Van Dyck was far better with men and dogs than with women and there is more pleasure to be had from the hounds and lapdogs that inhabit these paintings than from any of their ­masters and mistresses. With women he rarely had an intuitive response, seeing in them one characteristic only, broadly seductive or severe, offering nothing of their complexity nor of his own humanity in probing it.

This exhibition argues against Van Dyck’s being “a far better painter than we grudgingly allow”. It presents him as very much a second ranker, even a third, speciously brilliant among painters of the 10th. Amid the rag-tag-and-bobtail of his supposed succession, the visitor should seek out the sublime Self Portrait by Samuel Cooper, a tiny ­pocketful of self-centred sensibility, Pompeo Batoni’s Thomas William Coke, a life-size frivolity of the finest Grand Tour quality that has only the slightest peripheral connection with Van Dyck (ignore the assertion in the catalogue), and the matching pair of Self Portraits by William Dobson and Van Dyck — his very last, neatly disciplined, monochrome and melancholy, as though aware of things to come.
Van Dyck and Britain is at Tate Britain (020 7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk) until 17 May. Daily 10am-5.50pm. Admission £12.20, concs available.

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