VANDYCK.* 'THIS is a translation of a French work on
the master pub- lished some years back, and those who prefer to have their art history in English will find the translation serviceably done. M. Guiffrey is of the documentary order of writers on art, one of those patient people who investigate the legends that accumulate round famous names and succeed in most cases in disproving them. His pages do not offer a searching philosophy of the art of the man whose life he tells, nor does he strike one as very keenly sensitive to the appeal of painting ; but his attitude is "correct" and his information considerable.
What set M. Guiffrey on the task, to which he devoted many years, was, as he tells us, the discovery of a previous investigator of the last century, whose notes have remained practically buried in manuscript. The name of the writer in question is unknown, but his MS. passed in 1850 from the library of M. Godde to that of the Louvre. With the idea of publishing the new facts in this MS., combined with a thorough study of the pictures and other sources for the life, M. Guiffrey visited the galleries of Turin, Genoa, Florence, Rome, and other places, as well as the collections of Belgium and England. He has tracked the artist through the countries in which he did his work.
As good an instance as any of the correction of legend by the anonymous MS. is that of the Saventhem story, a favourite affair with the gossiping historians. The story runs that Vandyck, when setting out for Italy, dallied by the way at the village of Saventhem, not far from Brussels. Rubens, puzzled by his pupil's silence, made inquiries, and found that he had been captured by a young peasant girl, and "was forgetting everything under the influence of his passion," yet, "in order to gratify the wishes of his fair friend, he had executed two paintings for the church of the village where love kept him prisoner. Such was the origin of the Virgin and Child Jesus,' long since vanished, and the famous 'St. Martin,' which remains to this day on one of the altars of the church." There is a fairly obvious touch of legend in the peasant girl's desire that her lover should spend his time in beauti. fying the church, and ruthless documents, it appears, prove that not she, but the Baron of Saventhem, commissioned the 4‘ St. Martin," and that the other picture was commissioned by the wardens of the church after Vandyck returned from Italy. Documents leave us the girl, but not the peasant, give her the name of Van Ophem (probably Isabella), and show us the artist proposing for her hand and being rejected. Thus is legend's economical and fanciful way of putting two and • Sir Anthony Van Dyck; his Life and Work. By Jules Guifirey. Translated from the French by Wait= Allison. London: 11. Henry and Co. 1896.
two together defeated, and we gain instead the following facts about the lady :—" She resigned herself at last and con. tracted two successive marriages, which were both without issue. Though she took some time to forget, her health does not appear to have suffered much from this first youthful sorrow. She died, in fact, at the age of almost a hundred, in 1701. To the end of her life she retained a marked taste for works of art." From this point M. Guiffrey has more real stuff to deal with, and pursues the history of the painter's productions in Italy, brings him home again, disentangles the facts of the earlier visit to England, narrates what passed between that and his final settling down here as Court painter, and tells us what is known of his life in England.
Vandyck is not one of the artists who have left us interest- ing letters. There is nothing in his correspondence to com- pare with the letters and diaries of Albert Darer, for instance. The letters quoted are mainly of a business character. His portraits show us a handsome person, rumour paints him of a gallant and amorous disposition, his own words and acts prove him ambitious not only for his art, but for the specious and solid results it might yield. Ambition in his art meant rivalry with the achievements of his master Rubens. Wherever he went in Europe he was acclaimed as the painter of rank and fashion ; he received numerous commissions to paint pictures for ecclesiastical bodies ; but he may have felt disappointed that he never had the opportunity of matching himself against his master in such a series of " historical " paintings as those executed for the Luxembourg and now in the Louvre. The painting he designed for the Palace at Whitehall, where Rubens had painted a ceiling, was never executed. In worldly honour he takes his place among the princely painters of the seventeenth century. With Charles I., to name only his chief patron, he took a position comparable with that of Velazquez under Philip IV.; he maintained a lordly establishment, and in spite of intermittent payments, accumulated a considerable fortune.
If we pass from these secondary matters to his real character as a painter, he must take a lesser place than the three other giants of his century, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Velazquez. From the exuberant genius of the first he learned a magnifi- cent manner, and showed a special aptness for the state and elegance of Court life, but his painting moves to the end within what Rubens had invented. When he leaves portrait for other subjects he displays at once the limita- tions of his mind. A splendid style, a facile, swaggering way of arranging a picture, remains ; but it is empty rhetoric when compared with the deep dramatic poetry with which Rembrandt never failed to invest a scene. Velazquez, though at the outset he may have learned something from the por- traits by Vandyck that he saw in Italy, went on to develop a fineness and originality of vision that the latter never equalled. But in Vandyck's best work, portraits of young lords and of Princes in a style absolutely sympathetic with their subjects, or in those drawings and etchings of his painter friends, where a grand manner is mated with a keen scrutiny of character, we have the work of a master only coming short of the highest rank. He has a double claim to honour in England,—as the magnificent historian of a period of our national history, and as the founder of the English school of painting.
His work is abundantly illustrated in the volume before us. The pictures are wisely chosen from the less hackneyed collections, and if the etchings by which they are reproduced are not very interesting in themselves, they give a fair notion of the form and chiaroscuro of the pictures. Much more valuable are the photographic reproductions of drawings, with their illustration of a fine method, and of a spontaneous execution not always to be found throughout pictures whose rapid production required the help of several hands. The book, good as it is within its limits of documentary research, appeals to us most as a rich collection of the master's drawings and studies.
Previous page
