At heaven's gate ARTS
ROY STRONG .
In these troubled days, when the general public must be thinking that the art trade is little better
than a tarted-up branch of the Mafia, it is a pleasure to write of an exhibition mounted by one of London's most tried and trusty firms.
With characteristic generosity, a truly stupen- dous show of over sixty paintings by Sir Anthony van Dyck takes the stage at Agnew's in aid of Enterprise Neptune. Rarely can
these delectably tattered velvet walls have heaved beneath such an enticing burden. It
makes a sumptuous encore to Van Dyck's vision of rustling silks and cascading laces at the Queen's Gallery, but it also broadens our vision of the artist in an international context.
Like most other famous 'English' artists, Van Dyck was foreign and we have here unravelled both his Antwerp and Italian periods. And the impression that emerges is less of the vision be created than of the man himself. One doesn't think of Van Dyck, the darling of great courts, as among the most frustrated artists of the baroque age, but one should.
His greatest blessing was, at the same time, his greatest setback. As long as his master Rubens lived, Van Dyck had no chance of dominating the artistic scene in Europe, and Van Dyck outlived his master by just one year. At the very outset of his career, he left Antwerp for England to enter the service of James I, who promptly sent him off to Italy to be 'finished.' There he remained many years, but dogged this time by the fact that he was not a native, hence the grand commissions for huge altarpieces never really came his way. So he retreated again to Antwerp for a brief blaze of solitary splendour while his old master was in Spain; but Rubens returned. It was in this way that Van Dyck was forced to England in 1632, a remote island on the fringes of late renaissance culture.
But even here his potential was never fully realised. Puritanism threw a pall over religious commissions and near-bankruptcy curtailed large secular ones for the court. Instead, he and his assistants churned out endless portraits of pudding-faced English milords and their ladies in canvases which, id many instances, must have represented the first direct contact with 'art' that some of them had ever had. And ultimate defeat came with his failure to succeed Rubens on his death, even though he rushed back to Antwerp in expectation. Mercifully he died before civil war destroyed the vision that he had created of the cavalier court.
There are some ravishing items to fill out and expand the portrait of the martyr King and his family now on show in the Queen's Gallery. The heads of the two little princesses, Elizabeth and Anne, both destined to die in childhood, are of a touching prettiness. This sketch catches for me the stunning bravura of the master's own brush strokes which, with a slight twitch one way or the other or the appli- cation of a little more or a little less pressure, can delineate in breathtaking freshness a baby's face with mouth open and eyes cast upwards, or the serious tenderness of her three year old sister. Surely such creatures, snug in the whitest of lace bonnets, with pearls looped chastely
round their necks, can never have required any of the sordid basics of childhood.
Or, again, there is the infant Charles II, a pukka, tough little eight year old posing like a grown man in a tiny suit of armour, not so far removed from a modern child proud of its spaceman's kit. On 9 August 1641, the Prince had been rowed to Blackfriars to sit to Van Dyck. How extraordinary it must all have seemed a few months later, when his father raised the royalist standard at Nottingham and the King's subjects drifted reluctantly into civil war. The tranquil world of Van Dyck makes little allowance for war. There all things glow as if lit from within in an eternal, blessed twi- light, in which great ladies sit receiving garlands from a winged Cupid or gentlemen fondle their well-bred hounds. Or we catch a glimpse, in what is one of my favourite can- vases and a great treat to see again well lit, of the King and his Knights of the Garter gliding by in fairy-tale procession against classical architecture that was never realised by Inigo Jones.
Van Dyck, when he actually handles the paint himself, is of a dazzling virtuosity that puts him on the level of the greatest masters of European painting. Half the fun of this ex- hibition is one of connoisseurship, working out where the master finishes and studio assistants take over. We know he never worked more than an hour on any portrait at a time, making appointments for further sittings. We know, too, that he worked with an amazing rapidity, finish- ing the face and then sketching in the dress and pose of the figure to be passed on to his studio assistants. Later, before it was delivered, the portrait came back to him for a final touching over. This explains the extraordinary unevenness of the pictures which carry his name. To me Thomas Killigrew has all the crumbly impasto of a great autograph Van Dyck, while the famous double portrait of Lord Bristol and the Duke of Bedford seems like so much eye-catching stage scenery. But one can see why generations of artists and con- noisseurs have succumbed to this languorous portrayal of aristocratic scholar and poet soldier, replete with attributes in careless con- fusion and gorgeous trailing costumes of scarlet and black encrusted with gold. Smith, writing in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, proclaimed that this picture 'would of itself have been sufficient to have immortalised the painter.'
One is reminded, too, of the riches still mercifully adorning the walls of great houses. Petworth is represented by two fantastic full- lengths of Sir Robert Shirley and his Circassian wife, both dressed in Persian costume, as well as noble Strafford, gravely gesturing, and a group of Caroline beauties. From Althorpe come some amazing early works painted by Van Dyck when he was just about sixteen, besides grand full-lengths of the English period. From Boughton there are a group of his delicate sketches for the Iconography, the huge portrait volume he worked on. It is curious to reflect that neither the Tate nor the National Portrait Gallery, shrines of British art and
portraiture respectively, has a single Van Dyck in its collection. But the best Van Dycks of all in my memory are in America. He never touched the heights of his 'Genoese period again, and the National Gallery in Washington has a galaxy of these shadowed, glinting can- vases in which aristocratic ladies sit in utter stillness or waft into the sunlight with a negro page bearing a sunshade. These alone to me merit Gainsborough's celebrated deathbed statement to Reynolds: 'We shall all go to heaven and Van Dyck is of the company.'
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