FullReads

So they sat up to see the moon rise across the meadow.

At breakfast the next morning there was a little banter on the subject of painting. Could not the distinguished painter remain over one day and give his hosts a taste of his quality?

“I surely will if the fair Anna will sit for her portrait!” he courteously replied.

The fair Anna consented.

The servant who drove the cart had gotten on good terms with the servants of the household, and was being initiated into the mysteries of making Dutch cheese.

Meanwhile the master had improvised a studio and was painting the portrait of the charming Anna.

After working two whole days he destroyed the canvas because the picture was not keyed right, and started afresh. The picture was fairish good, but his desire now was to paint the beautiful Anna as the Madonna.

Van Dyck’s affections having been ruthlessly uprooted but a few days before, the tendrils very naturally clung to the first object that presented itself–and this of course was the intelligent and patient sitter, aged nineteen last June.

If Rubens could not paint the picture of a lady without falling in love with her, what should be expected of his best pupil, Van Dyck?

Pygmalion loved into life the cold marble which his hand had shaped, and thus did Van Dyck love his pictures into being. All portrait-painters are sociable–they have to be in order to get acquainted with the subject. The best portrait-painter in America talks like a windmill as he works, and tries a whole set round of little jokes, and dry asides and trite aphorisms on the sitter, meanwhile cautiously noting the effect. For of course so long as a sitter is coldly self-conscious, and fully mindful that he is “being took,” his countenance is as stiff, awkward, and constrained as that of a farmer at a dinner-party.

Hence the task devolves upon the portrait-artist to bring out, by the magic of his presence, the nature of the subject. “In order to paint a truly correct likeness, you must know your sitter thoroughly,” said Van Dyck.

The gracious Rubens prided himself on his ability in this line. He would often spend half an hour busily mending a brush or mixing paints, talking the while, but only waiting for the icy mood of the sitter to thaw. Then he would arrange the raiment of his patron, sometimes redress the hair, especially of his lady patrons, and once we know he kissed the cheek of the Duchess of Mantua, “so as to dispel her distant look.” I know a portrait-artist in Albany who is said to occasionally salute his lady customers by the same token, and if they protest he simply explains to them that it was all in the interest of art–in other words, artifice for art’s sake.

After three days at the charming old country-seat at Saventhem, Van Dyck called his servant and told him to take the shoes off of the saddle-horse, and turn it and the cart-horse loose in the pasture. He had decided to remain and paint a picture for the village church.

And it was so done.

The pictures that Van Dyck then painted are there now in the same old ivy-grown, moss-covered church at Saventhem. The next time you are in Brussels it will pay you to walk out and see them.

One of the pictures is called “Saint Martin Dividing His Cloak With Two Beggars.” The Saint is modestly represented by Van Dyck himself, seated astride the beautiful horse that Rubens gave him.

The other picture is “The Holy Family,” in which the fair Anna posed for the Virgin, and her parents and kinsmen are grouped around her as the Magi and attendants.

Both pictures reveal the true Van Dyck touch, and are highly prized by the people of the village and the good priests of the church. Each night a priest carries in a cot and sleeps in the chancel to see that these priceless works of art are protected from harm. When you go there to see them, give the cowled attendant a franc and he will unfold the tale, not just as I have written it, but substantially. He will tell you that Van Dyck stopped here on his way to Italy and painted these pictures as a pious offering to God, and what boots it after all!