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Anthony Van Dyck
by
But now he had a rival–the only real rival he had ever known. Van Dyck was making head. The rival was younger, handsomer, and had such a blandishing tongue and silken manner that the crowd began to call his name and declare he was greater than Caesar.
Yet Rubens showed not a sign of displeasure on his fine face–he bowed and smiled and agreed with the garrulous critics when they smote the table and declared that all of Van Dyck’s Madonnas really winked.
He bided his time.
And it soon came, for the agent of Lord Arundel, that great Maecenas of the polite arts, came over to Flanders to secure treasures, and of course called on Rubens.
And Rubens talked only of Van Dyck–the marvelous Van Dyck.
The agent secured several copies of Van Dyck’s work, and went back to England, telling of all that Rubens had told him, with a little additional coloring washed in by his own warm imagination.
To discover a genius is next to being one yourself. Lord Arundel felt that all he had heard of Van Dyck must be true, and when he went to the King and told him of the prodigy he had found, the King’s zeal was warm as that of the agent, for does not the “messianic instinct” always live?
This man must be secured at any cost. They had failed to secure Rubens, but the younger man had no family ties, no special property interests, neither was he pledged to his home government as was Rubens.
Straightway the King of England dispatched a messenger urging Anthony Van Dyck to come over to England. The promised rewards and honors were too great for the proud and ambitious painter to refuse. He started for England.
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In stature Van Dyck was short, but of a very compact build. He carried the crown of his head high, his chin in, and his chest out. His name is another added to that list of big-little men who had personality plus, and whose presence filled a room. Caesar, Napoleon, Lord Macaulay, Aaron Burr and that other little man with whom Burr’s name is inseparably linked, belong to the same type. These little men with such dynamic force that they can do the thinking for a race are those who have swerved the old world out of her ruts–whether for good or ill is not the question here.
When you find one of these big-little men, if he does not stalk through society a conquering Don Juan it is because we still live in an age of miracles.
Women fed on Van Dyck’s smile, and pined when he did not deign to notice them. He was royal in all his tastes–his manner was regal, and so proud was his step that when he passed forbidden lines, sentinels and servants saluted and made way, never daring to ask him for card, passport or countersign.
He gloried in his power and worked it to its farthest limit.
Unlike Rembrandt, he never painted beggars; nor did he ever stoop as Titian did when he pictured his old mother as a peasant woman at market, in that gem of the Belle d’ Arte at Venice; nor did he ever reveal on his canvas wrinkled, weather-worn old sailors, as did Velasquez.
He pictured only royalty, and managed, in all his portraits, to put a look of leisure and culture and quiet good-breeding into the face, whether it was in the original or not. In fact, he fused into every picture that he painted a goodly modicum of his own spirit. You can always tell a Van Dyck portrait; there is in the face a self-sufficiency, a something that speaks of “divine right”–not of arrogance, for arrogance and assumption reveal a truth which man is trying to hide, and that is that his position is a new acquirement. Van Dyck’s people are all to the manner born.