Works by Anthony van Dyck

Anthony van Dyck flattered his sitters, giving them height and an easy grace, first the nobles of Genoa and then the court of Charles I in London, where he was the king's chief painter.

He was already a skilled painter at fifteen: in the Self-portrait of about 1614 a youth with a mop of reddish hair glances back at us over his shoulder. By 1617, a free master in the Antwerp guild, he had joined the workshop of Rubens, who called him the best of his pupils.

He spent late 1621 to 1627 in Italy, mostly in Genoa, painting its nobles at full length, gazing down on us. Marchesa Elena Grimaldi Cattaneo of 1623 stands in black on a terrace while an attendant holds a red parasol above her head. Plague held him in Palermo in 1624, where his pictures of its saint, Rosalia, fair-haired in a Franciscan cowl, became her standard image. In the later Coronation of Saint Rosalia of 1629 she kneels in gold brocade, a skull and a lily below.

In 1632 he settled in London as Charles I's chief painter, was knighted, and painted the queen, by one estimate, about thirty times. In Queen Henrietta Maria with Sir Jeffrey Hudson she wears a shimmering blue gown and touches the monkey perched on Hudson; Sophia of Hanover, meeting her in 1641, was surprised to find a small woman with long thin arms and jutting teeth. Portraits lead below, beside religious and mythological scenes, prints and drawings. For the Iconographie, his series of portrait prints, he etched the heads of only eighteen himself; engravers worked up the rest from his drawings.

Sources: Wikipedia, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, National Gallery of Art.