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He was thirty-three years old when he arrived in England.

King Charles furnished the painter a house at Blackfriars, fronting the Thames, to insure a good light, and gave him a summer residence in Kent. All his expenses were paid by the State, and as his tastes were regal the demands on the public exchequer were not small. His title was, “Principal Painter in Ordinary to the King and Queen of England.”

Van Dyck had worked so long with Rubens that he knew how to use ‘prentice talent. He studied by a system and turned off a prodigious number of canvases. The expert can at once tell a picture painted by Van Dyck during his career in England: it lacks the care and finish that was shown in his earlier years. Yet there is a subtle sweep and strength in it all that reveals the personality of the artist.

Twenty-two pictures he painted of King Charles that we can trace. These were usually sent away as presents. And it is believed that in the seven years Van Dyck lived in England he painted nearly one thousand portraits.

The courtly manner and chivalrous refinement of the Fleming made him a prime favorite of Charles. He was even more kingly than the King.

In less than three months after he arrived in England Charles publicly knighted him, and placed about his neck a chain of gold to which was attached a locket, set with diamonds, containing a picture of the King.

A record of Van Dyck’s affairs of the heart would fill a book. His old habit of falling in love with every lady patron grew upon him. His reputation went abroad, and his custom of thawing the social ice by talking soft nonsense to the lady on the sitter’s throne, while it repelled some allured others.

At last Charles grew nettled and said that to paint Lady Digby as “The Virgin” might be all right, and even to turn around and picture her as “Susanna at the Bath” was not necessarily out of place, but to show Margaret Lemon, Anne Carlisle and Catherine Wotton as “The Three Graces” was surely bad taste. And furthermore, when these same women were shown as “Psyche,” “Diana” and the “Madonna”–just as it happened–it was really too much!

In fact, the painter must get married; and the King and Queen selected for him a wife in the person of a Scottish beauty, Maria Ruthven.

Had this proposition come a few years before, the proud painter would have flouted it. But things were changed. Twinges of gout and sharp touches of sciatica backed up the King’s argument that to reform were the part of wisdom. Van Dyck’s manly shape was tending to embonpoint: he had evolved a double chin, the hair on his head was rather seldom, and he could no longer run upstairs three steps at a time. Yes, he would get married, live the life of a staid, respectable citizen, and paint only religious subjects. Society was nothing to him–he would give it up entirely.

And so Sir Anthony Van Dyck was married to Maria Ruthven, at Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and the King gave the bride away, ceremonially and in fact.

Sir Anthony’s gout grew worse, and after some months the rheumatism took an inflammatory turn. Other complications entered, which we would now call Bright’s Disease–that peculiar complaint of which poor men stand in little danger.

The King offered the Royal Physician a bonus of five hundred pounds if he would cure Van Dyck: but if he had threatened to kill the doctor if the patient died, just as did the Greek friends of Byron, when the poet was ill at Rome, it would have made no difference.

A year after his marriage, and on the day that Maria Ruthven gave birth to a child, Anthony Van Dyck died, aged forty years. Rubens had died but a few months before.

The fair Scottish wife did not care to retain her illustrious name at the expense of loneliness, and so shortly married again. Whom she married matters little, since it would require a search-warrant to unearth even the man’s name, so dead is he. But inasmuch as the brilliant Helena Fourment, second wife of Rubens, whose picture was so often painted by her artist-husband, married again, why shouldn’t Madame Van Dyck follow the example?

It is barely possible that Charles Lamb was right when he declared that no woman married to a genius ever believed her husband to be one. We know that the wife of Edmund Spenser became the Faerie Queene of another soon after his demise, and whenever Spenser was praised in her presence she put on a look that plainly said, “I could a tale unfold.”

My own opinion is that a genius makes a very bad husband. And further, I have no faith in that specious plea, “A woman who marries a second time confers upon her first husband the highest compliment, for her action implies that she was so happy in her first love that she is more than willing to try it again.”

I think the reverse is more apt to be the truth, and that the woman who has been sorely disappointed in her first marriage is anxious to try the great experiment over again, in order if possible to secure that bliss which every daughter of Eve feels is her rightful due.

Maria Ruthven lived to rear a goodly brood of children, and Samuel Pepys records that she used to send a sort o’ creepy feeling down the backs of callers by innocently introducing her children thus: “This is my eldest daughter, whose father was Sir Anthony Van Dyck, of whom you have doubtless heard; and these others are my children by my present husband, Sergeant Nobody.” Van Dyck’s remains are buried in Saint Paul’s Cathedral. A very fine monument, near the grave of Turner, marks the spot; but his best monument is in the examples of his work that are to be found in every great art-gallery of the world.