Andrew Roberts

Save our Van Dyck!

Sir Anthony Van Dyck's final self-portrait is a vital part of Britain's artistic heritage

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Why should a portrait of a Flemish painter by a Flemish painter be considered so important to Britain that the culture minister Ed Vaizey has slapped a three-month export delay on it, and the National Portrait Gallery has announced a £12.5 million campaign to keep it in the country? Moreover, why is it so important that after reading this article you should immediately go to www.savevandyck.org and make a generous contribution to save it from going abroad? The answer lies in four words: Sir Anthony Van Dyck.

No other single artist has had such an impact on British art as Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641) not only in his own lifetime but also — as the 2009 Tate Britain’s exhibition demonstrated — right up to the 20th century. He was by far the most influential painter to have worked in Britain during the 17th century and must be seen as the launching point for so much of what happened artistically in subsequent generations. Van Dyck decisively turned British portraiture away from the stiff, formal, ‘iconic’ approach of Tudor and Jacobean painting, replacing it with that distinctive, fluid, shimmering, painterly style which was to dominate portraiture for nearly three centuries after his death. Making Britain his home from the beginning of his second visit in 1632 until his tragically early death in 1641, he painted the royal family and scores of other notable contemporaries. Flemish by birth, he was British by conviction; royalist by politics and patronage (he was knighted by Charles I), he was nonetheless utterly revolutionary as a painter. After him portraits weren’t just of people, they were about people.

This enigmatic self-portrait, his last, was painted in 1640–41, at the very end of Van Dyck’s life, and presents an intimate image of an artist at work. He shows himself actually in the act of painting, his hand raised in the process of applying paint to a canvas just out of sight.

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