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SIR PETER PAUL RUBENS (SIEGEN 1577 - ANTWERP 1640)

Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641)

c.1627-8

RCIN 404429

This portrait is a testament to the friendship of the two greatest masters of Flemish seventeenth-century painting. Anthony Van Dyck was born in Antwerp and studied with Hendrick van Balen (c.1575-1632); in 1618 he became a master of the Antwerp guild at the extraordinary young age of 19; at the same time he elected to join Rubens’s studio (as an assistant rather than a pupil and at the same time that he maintained his own studio with pupils), remaining there until 1620 and painting some of his most dramatic figure compositions. Van Dyck spent the winter of 1620-21 in London in the service of James I. In October 1621 he set off for Italy (initially in the retinue of the Countess of Arundel), where he worked in Palermo and Genoa as well as visiting the major artistic centres, Venice, Rome and Florence.

Van Dyck was back in Antwerp by July 1627, where he was created court painter by the Archduchess Isabella; he remained there until July 1632 when he was in London, being knighted and created ‘Principalle Paynter in Ordinarie to their Majesties’ Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria. He was largely domiciled in England for the rest of his life, through he seems to have had plans in late 1640 to return to Flanders, perhaps to profit from Rubens’s death in May of that year. This portrait must have been painted between July 1627, when Van Dyck returned to Antwerp from Italy, and August 1628, when Rubens left Antwerp for Spain. It is copied precisely in the much smaller portrait of Van Dyck, which appears with a group of Antwerp luminaries - including the Archdukes Albert and Isabella and Rubens himself - in Willem van Haecht’s Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest, signed and dated 1628 (Rubenshuis, Antwerp).

Catalogue entry adapted from Bruegel to Rubens: Masters of Flemish Painting, London, 2007


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