Van Dyck and Britain
Tate Britain, until 17 May
In the course of my work last week, which included attending the press view of van Dyck at the Tate and visiting a couple of artists’ studios, one in north London and one in Oxfordshire, I found myself thinking about the current state of exhibition catalogues. This train of thought was encouraged by having to carry the van Dyck catalogue around for two days, on and off public transport, along with the more essential items of the itinerant writer’s kit. I say ‘more essential’ because catalogues have become less useful as they’ve grown more unwieldy and overblown. These days they are not produced to serve the exhibition-going public, but solely to fill the coffers of the publishing department of the institution mounting the exhibition. For these departments are now run as separate businesses and must be seen to make fat profits.
Hasn’t this always been the case? No, the publishing of catalogues was previously a more modest operation, intended to serve scholarship and actually to enlighten members of the public. Before the advent of cheap colour printing, reproductions were few and in black and white. Texts were short and often concise. I’m certainly not against good colour illustrations, but what I am against is the production-line of vast catalogues, usually full of unreadable academic essays which languish self-importantly on coffee tables. How many are ever read, even if the texts are comprehensible and excitingly written? These obese publications need to be slimmed down, an operation particularly appropriate to the period of austerity we are entering. A smaller, more easily portable catalogue, with a good selection of reproductions and a couple of short and piquant esays would be infinitely preferable to the bloated monsters the public is asked to pay £30 for.
The exhibitions themselves are often equally out of proportion. The suite of basement galleries at Tate Britain, for instance, is so inflexible that exhibitions there have to be a standard size: large. As a consequence, there is much padding to make up exhibit numbers, rather than a potent focus on only the pictures that need to be hung to make an argument or a glorious showing. The van Dyck exhibition is a case in point. No doubt the organisers will say that the beginning and end of the exhibition are entirely necessary to put the artist in context by showing his forebears and his successors, but actually what people have come to see is confined to a couple of rooms in the middle.
What a fabulous exhibition this would be if it were restricted to a small group of top-quality paintings from the high period of van Dyck’s career! After all, there’s a limit to the amount of portraits of bovine (if attractive) girls and men with flowing locks one can admire at one go. Their identities are usually of little interest and only the type endures: aristocratic, calm in assurance (not to say arrogance), imbued with what appears to be natural nobility. Portraiture for van Dyck was about public role and image rather than an investigation of the private self, though the latter is what we get in the self-portraits and the paintings of the painter’s wife and mistress. Portraiture in general was beset by etiquette, flattery and the public mask; a formal and essentially diplomatic art form.
It was not about brutal revelation, as it has become in the modern period, but this does not mean it consisted solely of polite and formulaic depiction. Van Dyck revolutionised the English portrait. What he was particularly good at was sinuous yet natural-seeming poses, all easy movement (in fine Baroque style), together with the compositional checks and counters of superbly realised textures: skin, satin, leather, fur, silk, lace.
Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) was born in Antwerp and apprenticed at the early age of ten to Hendrik van Balen before working as an assistant to Rubens. He first came to London in 1620 (through the good offices of that percipient connoisseur the Earl of Arundel) and entered royal service, though he soon left to study in Italy and set up studio on his own, back in Antwerp. He returned to England in 1632 and remained here until he died, worn out, at the age of 42. He served the court of Charles I, painting the king memorably on horseback, shown here in Room 2 with the marvellous ‘Cupid and Psyche’, which demonstrates what he could do when not painting portraits. Here, too, is the splendid ‘James Stuart, 4th Duke of Lennox’ with his adoring greyhound, an idea pinched from Titian but exquisitely recycled.
In Room 3, the visitor is greeted by the remarkable double portrait of Lord John Stuart and his brother Lord Bernard, full of dash and bounce but both doomed for an early grave in the Civil War. To the right is the fair Frances, Lady Buckhurst, while to the left is William Feilding in striped pink pyjamas, indicative of his travels in India and Persia. At the end is that old sinner Archbishop Laud looking uncomfortable, as well he might. Here is the heartland of van Dyck’s constituency, further enhanced by the great ‘Self-Portrait with Endymion Porter’ in Room 4. There are other first-rate things, such as ‘Thomas Killigrew and another Gentleman’, ‘Anne Kirke’ and ‘Portrait of Sir William Killigrew’, but too many paintings by contemporaries. I preferred the room of drawings, with two of the best exhibits in the whole show: ‘A Study of Trees’ (from the British Museum) and ‘A Hilly Landscape with Trees and a Distant Tower’ (from Chatsworth). What a landscape painter van Dyck would have made…
Van Dyck had a huge and crucial influence on Reynolds, Gainsborough and Sargent, which does not mean that a few unexceptional examples of their work in the last room of the show will add a great deal to our enjoyment or understanding. In fact, this whole exhibition acts rather as a break to van Dyck’s amazing fluency, a hindrance to seeing his achievement clear. A smaller, more focused show would have served him better.
Comments