Dramas of Self-Presentation

By ROBERT HUGHES

In London, a show of masterly formal portraits by Van Dyck

The peculiar achievement of Sir Anthony van Dyck was to have invented the English gentleman--not the mild, knobbly, pink creature one sees beneath its bowler in the street, but the now vanishing archetype of aristocracy, calm and straight as a Purdey gun barrel, with the look of arrogant security guaranteed to paralyze all lesser breeds from Calais to Peshawar. This invention began in 1632, when Van Dyck, an ex-assistant of the greatest court painter of his age, Peter Paul Rubens, arrived in London. It ended with his death at the age of 42, in 1641. In between came seven years of service to the court of Charles I and his wife Queen Henrietta Maria, during which Van Dyck attained the kind of success that few artists of the time could imagine. Inundated with commissions, eulogized by poets, fluent and tireless, he helped set the cultural standards of the Caroline age.

Standing before Van Dyck's work, as a patron wrote to him, one felt "the Luck to be astonish'd in the righte Place." The current exhibition of Van Dyck's English portraits, organized by Art Historian Oliver Millar at the National Portrait Gallery in London, shows how well Van Dyck's fluency has lasted. It is a delectable exhibition, though cramped and clumsily installed, and it makes one realize how far the tradition of formal portraiture has declined since the days when Van Dyck epitomized it.

Certainly, Van Dyck knew how to make his sitters look handsomer than they were. Any cosmetician can do that; it is part of the ordinary transaction that painting and photography have with reality. Before photography, when one's idea of a strange face had to be set up by painting, the disparity between the evidence of the eye and the speech of the brush could sometimes come as a shock. One of Prince Rupert's sisters, who knew Queen Henrietta Maria only through the portraits of Van Dyck, was dismayed to meet a short woman with crooked shoulders, spindly arms, and teeth that stuck out of her mouth "like guns from a fort."

Another of Van Dyck's clients, however, the Countess of Sussex, lamented that he had made her look "very ill-favourede," stout in the cheeks, like one of the winds huffing and blowing. "But truely," she conceded, "I thinke it tis lyke the originale." The fact is that flattery is not a word that can quickly be defined, at least in portraiture. How it is used, what it means, depends on how the sitter feels about himself and how posterity will feel about the sitter. Our own bias, in a post-Freudian age, is toward portraits that show a "truth" about the sitter that the sitter was not willing to admit. But that is not how the portraitists of the 16th, 17th or 18th centuries saw their work.

Portraiture was a description of public roles, as well as a (necessarily discreet) essay on the private self. The unsparing vision of the later Rembrandt self-portraits was the exception in Baroque art, not the rule. In Munch or Van Gogh, portraiture resembles a siege laid to the Self by the Other. In Van Dyck or Reynolds, portraiture is diplomatic agreements between truth and etiquette, between private opinion and public mask. Since the Self is the sacred cow of today's culture, we are apt to find this less "interesting" than fictions of interrogation and disclosure. But that is our problem, not Van Dyck's. It is also, of course, why we have no formal portraiture of any value.

In looking at portraits, we project ourselves on the past. We routinely call Velasquez's pictures of dwarfs "compassionate," not because we know what Velasquez felt about dwarfs but because we believe we ought to feel sorry for the deformed. We like to detect ferocious antimonarchical satire in Goya's royal portraits, although the Spanish royal family was delighted with them and nobody at court thought them at all irreverent.

With Van Dyck, the question of flattery remains elusive, as it must with all great portraitists. Thus if one were to isolate the left-hand profile of Charles I from the triple portraits Van Dyck made to guide Bernini, a thousand miles away in Rome, in carving the bust of the monarch he had never seen, a Cromwellian might have much to say about it, starting with the sensuous coarseness of the nose, the air of shattered weakness suggested by the modeling of the mouth. Yet all that is questioned by the face-on portrait in the center, and refuted by the melancholy, angelic refinement of the King's three-quarter face on the right. If one wants to have a king, one would want him to look like that. Perhaps no 17th century portraits of exalted men (not even Rubens') display a more intense awareness of the nuances of skin as it stretches over bone and sags, or is drawn into the hollows of the skull: mobile, labile, silken, it becomes a facade of extreme expressiveness. No wonder that this painting was acclaimed, "not only," as a contemporary put it, "for the exquisitenesse of the worke but the likenesse and nere resemblance it had to the King's countenance."

Three kings within a King; a secular version, almost, of the Trinity, and implicitly a reminder of the divine right of kings. The grand military portraits are more straightforward; for example, the Earl of Strafford, lord lieutenant of a colonized island, erect in dark glittering armor and soft boots, worshiped by a huge Irish wolfhound--a direct quote from Titian, but with local political undertones. In such works one sees Van Dyck, as a London reviewer has remarked, "take British art by the seat of its Tudor hose and pull it into the modern age," or at least the Baroque one. No portraitist had more influence on the way the English presented themselves to the gaze of others. Without Van Dyck there would have been no Reynolds or Gainsborough or Sargent: it is almost as simple as that.

Before Van Dyck, English portraiture was stiffer and simpler. The single figure was composed around its own central axis, body and head facing declaratively toward the spectator: Here I am, this is all. With Van Dyck, portraiture became a drama of self-presentation, whether rhetorical or inwardly nervous. Part of his skill was to convey the illusion that the sitters, not he, had invented their poses. Bodies twist, elbows are cocked, eyes become as deft as those of fencers, and the entire surface--cheek, lace, sword hilt, foliage, silk, the clenched hand and the soft quatrefoil of suede that rests on boots like a leather butterfly--is alive with touch.

Van Dyck's most memorable portraits, to a modern eye, are those that set up a feeling of subtle tension inside this world of delectable surfaces. Thus with the full-length image of the two golden sons of the Duke of Lennox, Lords John and Bernard Stuart. "Most gentle, courteous and affable," a memorialist called one of them, "and of a spirit and courage invincible." On one level the portrait is an essay on rank, arrogance and the dauntlessness of youth. Lord John, on the left, proclaims his rights as elder brother by standing a step above Lord Bernard. But the rhythms of the design link them intricately together, and the gaze of superb, pale indifference Lord Bernard throws over his shoulder has the security of a rare animal looking at another and less interesting species. A few years later, both were dead in the Civil War. As usual, only the portrait remains, a shadow, like the rest of Van Dyck's English work, of the most sophisticated court that England ever possessed. --By Robert Hughes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.