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Anthony Van Dyck
by
More than once have the village peasants collected, armed with scythes, hoes and pitchforks, to protect these sacred pictures from vandalism on the part of lustful collectors or marauding bands of soldiers.
In Eighteen Hundred Fourteen, a detachment of French soldiers killed a dozen of the villagers, and a priest fell fighting for these treasures on the sacred threshold, stabbed to his death. Then the vandals tramped over the dead bodies, entered the church, and cut from its frame Van Dyck’s “Holy Family” and carried the picture off to Paris. But after Napoleon had gotten his Waterloo (only an hour’s horseback ride from Saventhem), the picture was restored to the villagers on order of the Convention.
Rubens waited expectantly, thinking to have news from his brilliant pupil in Italy. He waited a month. Two months passed, and still no word. After three months a citizen reported that the day before he had seen Van Dyck, aided by a young woman, putting up a picture in the village church at Saventhem.
Rubens saddled his horse and rode down there. He found Van Dyck and his lady-love sitting hand in hand on a mossy bank, in a leafy grove, listening to the song of a titmouse. Rubens did not chide the young man; he merely took him one side and told him that he had stayed long enough, and “beyond the Alps lies Italy.” He also suggested that Anthony Van Dyck could not afford to follow the example of his illustrious Roman namesake who went down into Egypt and found things there so softly luxurious that he forgot home, friends, country–all! To remain at Saventhem would be death to his art–he must have before him the example of the masters.
Van Dyck said he would think about it; and Rubens took a look at his old saddle-horse rolling in the pasture or wading knee-deep in clover, and rode back home.
In a few days he sent Chevalier Nanni down to the country-seat at Saventhem, to tell Van Dyck that he was on his way to Italy and that Van Dyck had better accompany him.
Van Dyck concluded to go. He made tearful promises to his beautiful Anna that he would return for her in a year.
And so the servant, who had become an expert in the making of Dutch cheese, caught the horses out of the pasture, and having rebroken them, the cavalcade started southward in good sooth.
* * * * *
It was four years before Van Dyck returned. He visited Milan, Florence, Verona, Mantua, Venice and Rome, and made himself familiar with the works of the masters. Everywhere he was showered with attention, and the fact that he was the friend and protege of Rubens won him admittance into the palaces of the nobles.
The four years in Italy widened his outlook and transformed him from a merely handsome youth into a man of dignity and poise.
Great was his relief when he returned to Antwerp to hear that the pretty Anna Van Ophem of Saventhem had been married three years before to a worthy wine merchant of Brussels, and was now the proud mother of two handsome boys.
Great was the welcome that Van Dyck received at Antwerp; and in it all the gracious Rubens joined. But there was one face the returned traveler missed: Isabella had died the year before.
The mere fact that a man has been away for several years studying his profession gives him a decided prestige when he returns. Van Dyck, fresh from Italy, exuberant with life and energy, became at once the vogue.
He opened a studio, following the same lines that Rubens had, and several churches gave him orders for extensive altarpieces.
Antwerp prided herself on being an artistic center. Buyers from England now and then appeared, and several of Rubens’ pictures had been taken to London to decorate the houses and halls of royalty.