A Meteor That Didn't Burn Out

By ROBERT HUGHES

King Charles I of England had several court painters, not all equally lucky. Anthony van Dyck was the luckiest of all. But how could one envy, say, Richard Gibson? He was not only a miniaturist but a dwarf who at a court banquet had to skip from a pie and walk the length of the table bearing portraits of the King and Queen he had copied after Van Dyck on playing cards. It cannot have been fun to be this small, if distinct, talent, awaiting his cue in a dark pastry coffin. But to be Van Dyck himself? A different matter.

A child prodigy at 14, a full professional by his early 20s and dead at 42, Van Dyck had one of those careers that is conventionally dubbed meteoric -- except that it did not burn out. His name has lasted three centuries. Which is not to say that he has altogether received his due. In a curious way, Van Dyck remains a somewhat underrated artist, as anyone might if he had to be constantly compared with Rubens, his master, and Titian, his even greater model. Especially, he is not well known to the American public, though some of his finest paintings are in America, owing to the vogue for his portraits among the robber barons of the early 20th century. Those who saw "Van Dyck in England," organized by Oliver Millar for the National Portrait Gallery in $ London eight years ago, are not likely to forget the impact of its high- strung, cool virtuosity. But the show did not travel to the U.S., and so the Van Dyck exhibition now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, curated with such care and scholarly zest by three art historians -- Susan J. Barnes, Julius S. Held and Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. -- offers many people their first proper look at this artist.

Van Dyck covered a lot of territory in his short life. He was Rubens' most gifted assistant in Antwerp, and his early ability to reproduce the style of his idol has led to prolonged squabbles over the attribution of some of his early paintings. What they leave no doubt of is Van Dyck's precocity, the speed with which he metabolized the lessons of his master. In 1620, when he was only 21, he was hired by King James I as a court painter in London. A year later he was in Genoa, painting its nobles and dignitaries, making study trips to Rome, Florence and Palermo. By 1627 he was back in Antwerp, and by 1632 the new English monarch, Charles I, had brought him back to London, knighted him and made him "principalle Paynter in ordinary to their Majesties." For his last 10 years he moved between London, Antwerp and Paris, accumulating honors, commissions and fame. All in all, he was as genuinely international a painter as Rubens had been, though he did not fly at quite the same diplomatic height.

In Washington one gets a full sense of his range, which was very large, from formal to intimate portraiture, from state commemoration to religious allegory. His big religious paintings, mostly for Flemish churches, are bravura performances, but none of them have the trumpeting conviction or the sheer inventiveness of Rubens'. His best paintings were his portraits and his secular allegories, like Rinaldo and Armida, 1629, done under the spell of Titian. Taken from Tasso's epic poem Jerusalem Delivered, a great favorite at Charles' court, it illustrates the moment when the sorceress Armida falls in love with the wandering Christian knight Rinaldo on glimpsing his sleeping face. The sensuous color, the glow of flesh and even the eyeline of the scene -- shot, as it were, from slightly below -- recall the Titians and Veroneses that Van Dyck had avidly studied in Venice seven years before; the flutter of Armida's red cloak, a discreet image of erotic turmoil, recalls the love god's cloak in Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne.

Van Dyck was truly a painter's painter. There is nothing intimidating about his work, as there often is about Rubens'. He loved private character and painted the interplay between that character and the public mask with a sensitivity that few artists have rivaled since. Sometimes he would seem to have done this by guesswork. His 1633 portrait of Henry Percy, "the Wizard Earl" who spent 16 years of his life immured in the Tower of London for his supposed complicity in the Gunpowder Plot, is an icon of saturnine intellect, from the same introspective domain as Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. But Van Dyck probably never met Percy, who died in 1632; he was working from a younger portrait by someone else.

Van Dyck loved the stuff of the world -- the shimmer and exact texture of fabrics (he was, after all, the son of a silk merchant in Antwerp), the brightness of flesh or the passing melancholy that settles on a face, the layering of vapor and light in the sky, the sheen of armor. In this sense of lavishness he was, of course, very much Titian's heir, and it is wonderful to see how much pictorial interest he could discover in inert substances -- particularly the brocades and velvets worn by his sitters -- in the course of translating them into patches and trails of pigment on canvas. He endowed the gold damascened parade armor of Emmanuel Philiberto of Savoy with a density of inspection that makes you feel you could lift it off the canvas if the prince were not wearing it.

The mark of Van Dyck's style is its extraordinary refinement, a delicacy that runs counter to what English 17th century taste had come to expect from Holland: "robustious boistrous druncken headed imaginary Gods," as Charles I's agent in Brussels remarked when trying to decide on an artist from whom to commission a story of Cupid and Psyche.

Van Dyck was not given to theorizing, but an intriguing phrase crops up in his scattered writings: he wanted to achieve, he said, een loechte maniere, "an airy style." In the process, writes Jeffrey M. Muller in the catalog, he "intentionally formed a style representative of grace." Grace meant facility, apparent ease, but in no superficial way: a style analogous to the poise and manners of the true gentleman, a conception of human character that was forming at the Stuart court even as he worked there and was thought to radiate from the person of the King. Let the French have their Roi Soleil, a periwigged divinity; Van Dyck would give the court an iconography of kingship that was, if not exactly informal, at least more humanly accessible.

When Bernini was to do a sculpture of Charles and would not come to England, it was Van Dyck who supplied the "natural" image of the King -- three faces, looking left, right and straight ahead -- from which the Roman artist was to work. Van Dyck's portraits of Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria fixed them for posterity with a completion that few later artists could rival. They have the subtlest quality of propaganda: they make you forget that they are propaganda. If we think of Charles as the cultivated king par excellence, it is largely thanks to Van Dyck. There cannot be a more tender and intimate royal portrait than his effigy of the couple in conversation in a rocky landscape, their bonding signified by, among other things, their dress -- he in pink slashed silk with pale gray showing beneath, she in the same gray with pink ribbons and laces; he giving her an olive twig, she giving him a laurel wreath.

Here and elsewhere in this excellent show, one sees Van Dyke chasing the Tudor stiffness out of painting, inventing the conventions of future English portraiture, the tropes on which Gainsborough, Reynolds and even Sargent would continually draw. The court he served was the most sophisticated one England would ever have. He did not outlive it; it was collapsing as he lay dying at the end of 1641. But Van Dyck had already changed English art decisively, and much for the better.