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拍品专文
A work of startling immediacy and force, this is an early masterpiece by the young and prodigiously talented van Dyck, whose work revolutionised portraiture in Europe and whose bravura ad vivum technique has enthralled artists and collectors to the present day. The picture has only once appeared on the market having remained in the collection of Rubens’ descendants until its sale in 2011. Painted on an unusually large single piece of oak, the panel remains outstandingly well preserved and provides a thrilling demonstration of van Dyck’s precocious virtuosity with the brush and ability to capture a living presence.
When the portrait resurfaced at auction in 2011, it was consigned by descendants of Rubens. Family tradition held that the portrait showed the ‘Confesseur de Rubens’ and that it was from the artist's collection, prompting some to argue, not unreasonably, in favour of an attribution to Rubens himself. Until then, the picture was known only from a photograph in Ludwig Burchard’s archive, and from a copy after it (also known through a photograph in the Burchard archive), where both describe it as a work by Rubens. Furthermore, it is well documented that the artist was acquainted with several Carmelite friars; his relationship with the order is attested to by the commissions he received in the second half of the 1610s, notably for the Portrait of a Carmelite Friar, probably Gaspar Rinckens, of circa 1615 in the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (fig. 1), and the Portrait of a Carmelite Prior of circa 1616 in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham. When the picture was taken to the Rubenianum in Antwerp prior to the sale, however, several leading scholars there were convinced it was a work executed by the youthful van Dyck while in Rubens’s studio. Having subsequently been exhibited in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Frick Collection over the course of the past decade the painting has now firmly entered the accepted canon of the work of van Dyck.
The argument in favour of van Dyck’s authorship is seemingly strengthened when comparing the present panel with the aforementioned Carmelite portraits by Rubens, which reveal marked discrepancies, both in terms of composition and style. There is not only a formality to the Birmingham and Rotterdam pictures, in which both friars are shown in prayer, a quality entirely absent from this strikingly informal portrait, but the treatment and application of paint is palpably inconsistent. Here the artist has captured his sitter with both speed and an astonishing volume of pigment, producing a portrait of disarming vitality. Such an approach to a commission seems highly improbable, and the suggestion that the portrait shows a friend or relation of the author is certainly convincing. As Stijn Alsteens observed in the 2016 exhibition catalogue, where he dated the present panel to circa 1618: ‘It would be hard to find in Rubens’s oeuvre a parallel for the fragmented rendering of the face, with its thick highlights, touches of pink and black, and hatching to evoke the facial hair around the mouth … Rubens’s virtuosity remains more restrained’ (Van Dyck, The Anatomy of Portraiture, New Haven & London, 2016, p. 73).
A dating of circa 1618 is consistent with the support which bears the makers-mark of Peeter de Noble, a master in the Antwerp guild since 1604, who pursued a career as a carpenter in 1619, rather than as a panel maker. The brand of the city's Panel-makers’ Guild applied to the reverse – showing the ‘Antwerp hands’ and castle – was in use from 1618-1626. This dating was also supported by dendrochronological analysis undertaken at the time of the 2011 sale, which concluded that the oak is very similar to two panels dated 1618 and 1620 by Pieter Breughel the Younger.
Rubens’s pictures by van Dyck
When Rubens died in 1640 he owned no fewer than ten works described as by van Dyck. Interestingly, all of these appear to have been executed before van Dyck’s departure for Italy in 1621, some being left to his master as a ‘token of his gratitude and of the progress he had made under his supervision’ (I. Bullart, Academie des sciences et des arts, contenant les vies & les eloges historiques des hommes illustres…, Amsterdam and Paris, 1682, p. 476). Among those works gifted to the artist were two of van Dyck’s early masterpieces, Christ Crowned with Thorns (c. 1618-20) and The Betrayal of Christ (c. 1620-21), both of which were bought for King Philp IV of Spain at the sale of Rubens’ goods and are now in the Prado, Madrid. The latter was hung above the mantelpiece in the most important room in Rubens’ house. Others included in the 1640 inventory were the remarkable Saint Jerome with an Angel at Rotterdam (c. 1618-20; Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, on loan from the Foundation Willem van der Vorm) and Saint Ambrosius barring Theodosius from Milan Cathedral (1618-21; London, National Gallery), a work based on Rubens’ treatment of the same subject (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), painted a few years earlier and with van Dyck's involvement. While it has not been possible to connect the present portrait with any of the descriptions listed in the inventory, there is mention of ‘A parcel of Faces after the life, upon bord and Cloth as well by sr Rubens as van Dycke’. Moreover, it is very likely that there were additional pictures by van Dyck in his master’s collection that were not included in the inventory. Rubens had stipulated that no portraits of himself or of his two wives should be offered for sale and it seems reasonable to suppose that a portrait of ‘his confessor’ or, at least someone who was on intimate terms with the artist, should also be retained for the family. As Lammertse and Vergara have observed: ‘the paintings by van Dyck that Rubens owned were not those closest to his own style, but more personal works' (‘A Portrait of Van Dyck as a Young Artist’, in The Young Van Dyck, exhibition catalogue, Madrid, 2013, p. 28).
The early years with Rubens
In 1609, at the age of ten, van Dyck’s father enrolled him as a pupil of Hendrik van Balen. This was an obvious choice for his son’s teacher; van Balen was not only Dean of the Guild of Saint Luke in Antwerp, but he also lived on the same street as the van Dyck family. How long van Dyck remained with van Balen is unclear, but he eventually joined Rubens, thereby entering the most illustrious studio in the city. A lack of documentary evidence has ensured that scholars have energetically debated van Dyck’s artistic activities from this period. As Friso Lammertse and Alejandro Vergara have suggested, van Dyck may have joined Rubens as early as 1611 or 1612 (ibid., p. 27). Some have argued that the young prodigy must have been operating his own independent studio with assistants from 1615-1618, a period in which he executed the Christ Carrying the Cross for the church of Sint-Pauluskerk in Antwerp, one of the few early commissions for which there is documentary evidence, which reveals the remarkable fact that the artist was paid the same amount as Rubens who contributed a Flagellation (inscribed 1617) as part of the same commission. What seems highly probable is that the artists were collaborating by late 1616 or early 1617 on works such as Achilles discovered by Ulysses and Diomedes, dated to circa 1617-18 (Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado). In February 1618 van Dyck was registered as a master with the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke. It has long been assumed that van Dyck was the artist described by Rubens as his ‘best pupil’ in the frequently quoted letter sent that year to the English diplomat and collector, Sir Dudley Carleton. By November 1620, van Dyck’s status in his master’s workshop is confirmed in a letter from Toby Matthew, an agent working for Carleton, in which he is referred to as 'Rubens' famous Allievo'. When van Dyck left Antwerp for Italy in the autumn of 1621 he had painted over 160 pictures, a body of work that many artists would struggle to produce over a lifetime. This prolific output was in part down to the speed and facility with which he painted but, equally, it was the irrepressible confidence of this young artist who was able to create both dynamic portraits and large-scale, multi-figural compositions with an assuredness that belied his youth.
Legacy
When van Dyck died in London in 1641 aged only 42, he left a body of work that was extraordinary, both in terms of volume and stylistic breadth. What is perhaps particularly astonishing about his artistic development is that unlike so many painters, including Titian, the individual who arguably exerted the greatest influence on him, van Dyck’s early years in Antwerp are unquestionably his most expressive in terms of his use of paint. These early works are characterised by a richness and variety of texture that are in striking contrast to the restrained, courtly style that brought the artist such success during his final years in England. One has a constant sense when confronted with the pictures from van Dyck’s ‘first Antwerp period’, that he is competing with Rubens, constantly recasting his master’s compositions and trying to out-perform him in terms of stylistic brio. Although the compositional swagger of his later portraits would cast a long shadow over subsequent generations of painters, notably Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Lawrence and John Singer Sargent, van Dyck also revolutionised portraiture through his handling of paint: his extravagant, broken brushwork and richly impastoed surfaces, so wonderfully exhibited in the present portrait, foreshadows the work of Rembrandt, his near contemporary, and other later towering artistic figures from Cézanne (fig. 2) to Lucian Freud (fig. 3).
When the portrait resurfaced at auction in 2011, it was consigned by descendants of Rubens. Family tradition held that the portrait showed the ‘Confesseur de Rubens’ and that it was from the artist's collection, prompting some to argue, not unreasonably, in favour of an attribution to Rubens himself. Until then, the picture was known only from a photograph in Ludwig Burchard’s archive, and from a copy after it (also known through a photograph in the Burchard archive), where both describe it as a work by Rubens. Furthermore, it is well documented that the artist was acquainted with several Carmelite friars; his relationship with the order is attested to by the commissions he received in the second half of the 1610s, notably for the Portrait of a Carmelite Friar, probably Gaspar Rinckens, of circa 1615 in the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (fig. 1), and the Portrait of a Carmelite Prior of circa 1616 in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham. When the picture was taken to the Rubenianum in Antwerp prior to the sale, however, several leading scholars there were convinced it was a work executed by the youthful van Dyck while in Rubens’s studio. Having subsequently been exhibited in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Frick Collection over the course of the past decade the painting has now firmly entered the accepted canon of the work of van Dyck.
The argument in favour of van Dyck’s authorship is seemingly strengthened when comparing the present panel with the aforementioned Carmelite portraits by Rubens, which reveal marked discrepancies, both in terms of composition and style. There is not only a formality to the Birmingham and Rotterdam pictures, in which both friars are shown in prayer, a quality entirely absent from this strikingly informal portrait, but the treatment and application of paint is palpably inconsistent. Here the artist has captured his sitter with both speed and an astonishing volume of pigment, producing a portrait of disarming vitality. Such an approach to a commission seems highly improbable, and the suggestion that the portrait shows a friend or relation of the author is certainly convincing. As Stijn Alsteens observed in the 2016 exhibition catalogue, where he dated the present panel to circa 1618: ‘It would be hard to find in Rubens’s oeuvre a parallel for the fragmented rendering of the face, with its thick highlights, touches of pink and black, and hatching to evoke the facial hair around the mouth … Rubens’s virtuosity remains more restrained’ (Van Dyck, The Anatomy of Portraiture, New Haven & London, 2016, p. 73).
A dating of circa 1618 is consistent with the support which bears the makers-mark of Peeter de Noble, a master in the Antwerp guild since 1604, who pursued a career as a carpenter in 1619, rather than as a panel maker. The brand of the city's Panel-makers’ Guild applied to the reverse – showing the ‘Antwerp hands’ and castle – was in use from 1618-1626. This dating was also supported by dendrochronological analysis undertaken at the time of the 2011 sale, which concluded that the oak is very similar to two panels dated 1618 and 1620 by Pieter Breughel the Younger.
Rubens’s pictures by van Dyck
When Rubens died in 1640 he owned no fewer than ten works described as by van Dyck. Interestingly, all of these appear to have been executed before van Dyck’s departure for Italy in 1621, some being left to his master as a ‘token of his gratitude and of the progress he had made under his supervision’ (I. Bullart, Academie des sciences et des arts, contenant les vies & les eloges historiques des hommes illustres…, Amsterdam and Paris, 1682, p. 476). Among those works gifted to the artist were two of van Dyck’s early masterpieces, Christ Crowned with Thorns (c. 1618-20) and The Betrayal of Christ (c. 1620-21), both of which were bought for King Philp IV of Spain at the sale of Rubens’ goods and are now in the Prado, Madrid. The latter was hung above the mantelpiece in the most important room in Rubens’ house. Others included in the 1640 inventory were the remarkable Saint Jerome with an Angel at Rotterdam (c. 1618-20; Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, on loan from the Foundation Willem van der Vorm) and Saint Ambrosius barring Theodosius from Milan Cathedral (1618-21; London, National Gallery), a work based on Rubens’ treatment of the same subject (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), painted a few years earlier and with van Dyck's involvement. While it has not been possible to connect the present portrait with any of the descriptions listed in the inventory, there is mention of ‘A parcel of Faces after the life, upon bord and Cloth as well by sr Rubens as van Dycke’. Moreover, it is very likely that there were additional pictures by van Dyck in his master’s collection that were not included in the inventory. Rubens had stipulated that no portraits of himself or of his two wives should be offered for sale and it seems reasonable to suppose that a portrait of ‘his confessor’ or, at least someone who was on intimate terms with the artist, should also be retained for the family. As Lammertse and Vergara have observed: ‘the paintings by van Dyck that Rubens owned were not those closest to his own style, but more personal works' (‘A Portrait of Van Dyck as a Young Artist’, in The Young Van Dyck, exhibition catalogue, Madrid, 2013, p. 28).
The early years with Rubens
In 1609, at the age of ten, van Dyck’s father enrolled him as a pupil of Hendrik van Balen. This was an obvious choice for his son’s teacher; van Balen was not only Dean of the Guild of Saint Luke in Antwerp, but he also lived on the same street as the van Dyck family. How long van Dyck remained with van Balen is unclear, but he eventually joined Rubens, thereby entering the most illustrious studio in the city. A lack of documentary evidence has ensured that scholars have energetically debated van Dyck’s artistic activities from this period. As Friso Lammertse and Alejandro Vergara have suggested, van Dyck may have joined Rubens as early as 1611 or 1612 (ibid., p. 27). Some have argued that the young prodigy must have been operating his own independent studio with assistants from 1615-1618, a period in which he executed the Christ Carrying the Cross for the church of Sint-Pauluskerk in Antwerp, one of the few early commissions for which there is documentary evidence, which reveals the remarkable fact that the artist was paid the same amount as Rubens who contributed a Flagellation (inscribed 1617) as part of the same commission. What seems highly probable is that the artists were collaborating by late 1616 or early 1617 on works such as Achilles discovered by Ulysses and Diomedes, dated to circa 1617-18 (Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado). In February 1618 van Dyck was registered as a master with the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke. It has long been assumed that van Dyck was the artist described by Rubens as his ‘best pupil’ in the frequently quoted letter sent that year to the English diplomat and collector, Sir Dudley Carleton. By November 1620, van Dyck’s status in his master’s workshop is confirmed in a letter from Toby Matthew, an agent working for Carleton, in which he is referred to as 'Rubens' famous Allievo'. When van Dyck left Antwerp for Italy in the autumn of 1621 he had painted over 160 pictures, a body of work that many artists would struggle to produce over a lifetime. This prolific output was in part down to the speed and facility with which he painted but, equally, it was the irrepressible confidence of this young artist who was able to create both dynamic portraits and large-scale, multi-figural compositions with an assuredness that belied his youth.
Legacy
When van Dyck died in London in 1641 aged only 42, he left a body of work that was extraordinary, both in terms of volume and stylistic breadth. What is perhaps particularly astonishing about his artistic development is that unlike so many painters, including Titian, the individual who arguably exerted the greatest influence on him, van Dyck’s early years in Antwerp are unquestionably his most expressive in terms of his use of paint. These early works are characterised by a richness and variety of texture that are in striking contrast to the restrained, courtly style that brought the artist such success during his final years in England. One has a constant sense when confronted with the pictures from van Dyck’s ‘first Antwerp period’, that he is competing with Rubens, constantly recasting his master’s compositions and trying to out-perform him in terms of stylistic brio. Although the compositional swagger of his later portraits would cast a long shadow over subsequent generations of painters, notably Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Lawrence and John Singer Sargent, van Dyck also revolutionised portraiture through his handling of paint: his extravagant, broken brushwork and richly impastoed surfaces, so wonderfully exhibited in the present portrait, foreshadows the work of Rembrandt, his near contemporary, and other later towering artistic figures from Cézanne (fig. 2) to Lucian Freud (fig. 3).