Anthony van Dyck’s An Andalusian horse — and the rare landscape study discovered on its reverse

While he was still in his teens, Anthony van Dyck swiftly worked his way up the ranks in Peter Paul Rubens’s studio in Antwerp. Rubens would go on to describe him as ‘the best of my pupils’.

In 1621, now in his early twenties, Van Dyck felt the time was right to move on — to embark on a fresh chapter of his career, in Italy. It’s said that, before doing so, he made a noteworthy exchange of gifts with his master.

Van Dyck reportedly produced a handful of pictures for Rubens, including perhaps the portrait of the latter’s wife Isabella, today found in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In return, aware of the younger man’s love of horses, Rubens gifted one of the finest steeds from his stable for Van Dyck’s use on his travels.

According to Thomas Gambier Parry, the esteemed 19th-century collector, the horse in question was traditionally thought to have been the same one as appears in the painting An Andalusian horse.

This landmark work by Van Dyck is being offered in Old Masters Part I at Christie’s on 3 December 2024, during London Classic Week.

Created around 1621, shortly before the artist set out for Italy, An Andalusian horse features a grey stallion before an open landscape. It is painted with remarkable fluency and vigour, demonstrating the young artist’s bravura technique.

Adopting a prepared grey ground, Van Dyck used rapidly brushed strokes of dark brown paint to articulate the outline of the horse’s body, before lavishly applying highlights in lead white to capture its modelling. The result is a forceful image of equine power. It was also the artist’s first grand-scale picture of a horse without a rider — the first of many across his career.

Hailing from the Iberian peninsula, the Andalusian was, even by Van Dyck’s day, a long-established breed of horse. It was highly prized by Europe’s elite, renowned, among other attributes, for its beauty, brains, athleticism and flowing mane. King Henry VIII of England is known to have received a number of these horses as presents upon his wedding to Catherine of Aragon in 1509.

His compatriot William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle, a celebrated breeder, would describe the Andalusian as ‘the noblest horse in the world’, adding that ‘from the tip of its ears to the tip of its hoofs, there is none to match its cut’.

The picture coming to auction has long been regarded as a preparatory work for a portrait Van Dyck made of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, on horseback. That portrait dates from around the same year, 1621, and is found in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

Charles V had died a few decades earlier, and the painting was very likely commissioned posthumously by one of his descendants. Van Dyck would base his composition on the equestrian portrait of the ruler by Titian, Emperor Charles V at Mühlberg (1548) — today part of the collection of the Prado in Madrid.

It is Van Dyck’s earliest surviving piece of equestrian portraiture, a genre he helped take to new heights in the mid-17th century. His two pictures of King Charles I of England on horseback from the 1630s — painted during a decade when he lived in London, and today found in the Royal Collection and the National Gallery — rank among the most famous equestrian portraits in the history of Western painting.

Writing in The Burlington Magazine in 2002, the art scholar Sir Oliver Millar suggested that when Van Dyck started work on the picture we now know as An Andalusian horse, he may actually have intended it to be the portrait of Charles V he had been commissioned to paint. For some reason, though, he wasn’t quite happy, cut down the canvas at an early stage, and adapted it for use instead as a study for the horse in the final painting (now in the Uffizi).

Sir Oliver’s suggestion was prompted by an X-ray of An Andalusian horse carried out in the early 2000s, which hinted that Van Dyck had begun to paint, then erased, an armoured rider on the stallion’s back. As documented in the video above, the picture underwent infrared analysis earlier this year, which revealed, in fact, the underlying traces of a saddle and stirrups ready to receive a rider, albeit with no trace of the man himself.

The painting was last offered for sale at Christie’s in 2000, and it was around then that a conservator removed a relining canvas that had been applied at some point to the back of An Andalusian horse. A rare landscape study was discovered on the reverse of Van Dyck’s canvas.

Unknown for centuries, A wooded landscape — a sketch occupies an important place in the artist’s oeuvre. Though Van Dyck is recorded as having painted a number of independent landscape pictures, this is his only surviving work in oils in that genre. Executed in loose brushstrokes, it shows a steep, tree-covered bank on the left, which slopes down to a lake where a dog is seen drinking.

Millar raised the possibility that the work might have been a study used by Van Dyck when painting the landscape backdrop to a portrait now in the Louvre. The sloping bank is common to both images. (Painted around 1620, the portrait is believed to be of the Antwerpian civic official Joannes Woverius, with his young son.)

When the aforementioned Gambier Parry acquired An Andalusian horse in 1859, he was unaware of the landscape study on the back. In making the purchase, he saw off competition from Sir Charles Eastlake, who was looking to secure the work for the National Gallery, the institution of which he was director.

Gambier Parry hung the painting at Highnam Court, his home in Gloucestershire, where he also kept a fine collection of early Italian Renaissance pictures by the likes of Bernardo Daddi, Fra Angelico and Pesellino. It stayed within his family, by descent, until the sale in 2000. (Much of Gambier Parry’s collection remains intact at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.)

Van Dyck’s expressive use of paint in An Andalusian horse is typical of his formative years in Antwerp, when his works were characterised by a rich and varied texture. This was in contrast to the more restrained, courtly style that brought the artist success in his portraits of powerful patrons in England — both with horses and without.

Van Dyck died in London in 1641, at the age of 42. According to Giovanni Pietro Bellori, writing in his biography of the artist a few decades later, Van Dyck excelled in portraiture which ‘apart from physical likeness… gave a certain nobility to heads, and grace to poses’. Bellori was talking about human subjects, but his words might well also apply to the subject of An Andalusian horse.

Explore art from antiquity to the 21st century at Classic Week, 26 November to 12 December 2024 at Christie’s in London. On view from 29 November