The Musée Jacquemart-André is staging France’s first major retrospective of the work of Antoon Van Dyck until 25 January 2009. The exhibition is the first one, in France, devoted to Van Dyck as a portraitist. Van Dyck has place of honour this year, with paintings and a dozen drawings on loan from the most prestigious public collections in Europe and the United States. Such a collection has never before been assembled.
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Portrait de famille Saint-Pétersbourg, Musée de l’Ermitage Musée National de l'Ermitage, St. Petersbourg Photos © Musée National de l'Ermitage/Photographes : Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets, Svetlana Suetova |
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The museum is paying homage to an artist unanimously considered in the XVII and XVIII centuries as Europe’s greatest portrait painter since Titian and whose influence on portrait painters in subsequent centuries was considerable. Even today, Van Dyck still has the power to inspire fascination with his technical virtuosity and the elegance of his artistic skills. The exhibition retraces his life and works, and invites the visitor to accompany the artist on his journeys and to explore his sources of inspiration.
From child prodigy...
A young man of genius: The exhibition opens with a view of Van Dyck’s early years and his first artistic works, produced in Antwerp, his city of birth. Antoon Van Dyck was a truly gifted youngster - Rubens became his mentor and friend when Van Dyck was barely eighteen years old. A wide-ranging selection of his early portraits, painted in the great tradition of Flemish portraiture, already reveals his desire to achieve a more relaxed yet enlivened style and also to highlight the nobility of his models by drawing his inspiration from portraits from the Italian Renaissance, notably the great Venetian tradition.
The discovery of Italy: Accompanying the young artist, the visitor will discover another world. Van Dyck made a journey to Italy (1621 to 1627) to broaden his knowledge of the Italian masters. He became the favourite artist of elegant Genoese society and produced a number of portraits, by turns spontaneous or serious, asserting his own style through an assimilation of the art of Rubens, Titian, the great portraitists from Bergamo (Moroni), and Raphael.
PORTRAIT OF MARIA DE TASSIS Around 1629-1630 Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna Oil on canvas, 128 x 99,5 cm
© Sammlungen des Fürsten von und zu Liechtenstein, Vaduz |
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… to prince of portrait painters
A gentleman artist On his return to Flanders, Van Dyck abandoned the traditional rigour of Flemish art. The works gathered into this collection are testimony to the great diversity of his compositions and his progress towards making his models feel at ease, while at the same time presenting a noble stance, combined with an exceptional arrangement of fine costumes and shimmering colours (Portrait of Maria de Tassis, Vienna, Liechtenstein Museum). His refined manner and the magnificence of his lifestyle perfectly suited his aristocratic clientele - he was the ideal “gentleman painter”.
The favourite portraitist of the English court
Yet it was at the English court, where he arrived in the early 1630s, that Van Dyck truly became a court portraitist. In his portraits of the English aristocracy and of members of the Royal Family, the artist strikes a happy medium between the necessary degree of dignity, grande ur and a more relaxed air hitherto absent from portraits of royalty. This subtle balance is particularly apparent in his portraits of King Charles I. The exhibition ends with an unrivalled selection of these dazzling works for which the artist is justly famous.
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Esquisses représentant la princesse Elisabeth et la princesse Anne - Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinbourg. Scottish National Portrait Gallery |
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Van Dyck
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