By James D. Balestrieri
NEW YORK CITY — A great portrait is a balancing act between capturing likeness and revealing inner character, between fidelity to appearance — verisimilitude — and exposing the sitter’s inner light to the light of day: the eyes of beholders, viewers, us. But in great portraiture there is another requisite element: mystery. The portraitist must hint at something else, something other, something that shimmers at the surface — often in the eyes, mouth or hands of the sitter — a moment that passed, perhaps, between the artist and the sitter, a secret we suspect but can never fully be in on.
How can we know when a portrait has this quality? The simplest answer is that when a portrait moves us to try to bore into it, to decode its subject, the sitter, time and again, that mystery is present. But there is a more scientific method. If collectors and cultural institutions, over a lengthy period, single out, vie for and prize portraits of people they could never have known, people they have no relation to, people whose names may well be lost or mean little to history, then we may be sure that the artist has captured lightning in a bottle. When this is evident, as in the case of Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641), new questions emerge about the production and consumption of portraits, and about their place and meaning in disparate cultures over time. With more than 100 of the artist’s works in the exhibition “Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture,” on view at the Frick Collection until June 5, opportunities to consider these questions abound.
Anthony van Dyck must have been a wunderkind. Born to affluent parents in Antwerp, he began serious studies when he was 10 years old, opened a workshop with Jan Brueghel the Younger when he was 16 and was the star pupil and chief assistant to Peter Paul Rubens by age 19. In 1620, he made his first trip to England, where he worked for King James I and — perhaps most important — had the opportunity to view a number of Titian’s paintings. As Stijn Alsteens, curator of northern European drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and organizer of the exhibition, writes in his essay for the Frick catalog A Portraitist’s Progress, van Dyck would adopt the “free brushwork” as well as “the restrained informality and elegant liveliness of the sitter’s pose” that characterized the Venetian master’s technique.
Perhaps inspired by this exposure to Italian painting, van Dyck left Antwerp for Italy in 1621 and remained there, in Genoa for the most part, until 1627.
In Italy, building on Titian and others, van Dyck began to paint dramatic, full-length, multifigure portraits of prominent Italian families. He also injected some drama — in the form of rock star flair — into his public persona, favoring fine silks and furs and acquiring an entourage.
Fast aside: this is a good time for historical portraiture in New York. Along with the van Dyck exhibition at the Frick, the Hans Memling altarpiece at the Morgan Library and Museum, “Picturing Prestige: New York Portraits” at the Museum of the City of New York and the exciting survey “Vigee Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France” at the Metropolitan Museum make this an unusually good time to gaze at and wonder about faces from the past.
The Le Brun show and the study of women artists of the past circle back to van Dyck in an interesting way. In 1624, van Dyck traveled to Palermo, Sicily, to visit Sofonsiba Anguissola, an eminent portrait painter, principally to the Spanish court. As he was drawing her and painting her portrait, the 92-year-old Anguissola — who had studied informally with Michelangelo — was still razor sharp, giving van Dyck practical advice that survives in his notes, and is apparent in his work. For example, “not to take the light too high, so that the shadows in the wrinkles of old age should not be too strong.”
The new king of England, Charles I, a fervent patron of the arts, sought to attract the best painters from all over Europe. In 1632, after having spent several years back in Antwerp, van Dyck joined the Gentileschis, Orazio and his daughter Artemisia — possibly the most celebrated father-daughter painting team in history — and others at Charles’s refined court, which would come to a bloody end after the English Civil War and the ascension of Oliver Cromwell a scant decade later.
Van Dyck was quickly knighted, enjoyed the friendship and favor of the king, his family and the nobility, and his studio hummed with activity. Though his surviving drawings display incredible skill and sensitivity, his prodigious output — some 260 surviving portraits between 1632 and his early death in 1641, just prior to the outbreak of the Civil War — caused him to forgo the many drawings and studies that generally attended the development of portraits. Van Dyck sketched the pose and draperies, often leaving the act of transferring these areas onto canvas to his subordinates, but painted the heads from life, in oil sketches and directly onto the painting.
Because this method required multiple visits to the studio, often in the same week, van Dyck had to play host to his illustrious sitters, creating a salon of sorts, offering meals and entertainment while he worked, and between sittings. But perhaps in this economic efficiency lies one of the secrets of his success. Perhaps these repeat visits allowed van Dyck to get to know his subjects well. Perhaps observing them as they dined, or as they watched the music, dancing and recitations he provided, or as they conversed with him put them at an unguarded ease they themselves were unaware of. Perhaps necessity, for van Dyck, was the mother of insight — and genius.
The ease and intimacy that van Dyck discovered in his subjects and conveyed in his art transformed English and Continental portraiture for centuries. Small watercolor landscapes he painted in England introduced that nation’s painters to both the medium and to landscape painting in general. Van Dyck also excelled in the medium of etching, creating an iconographie of famous people, affordable portraits that enjoyed a good deal of popularity, especially among artists who frequently studied and copied them. They remained in print — and other artists added to the folio — well into the Nineteenth Century.
Commissioning a portrait confers status on — and confirms the status of — the sitter. In an age before photography, portraits commemorated; they became key images in the memory of a family, a bloodline, indicating longevity and continuity.
But what is a portrait when it passes out of the family, or when the family — the bloodline — passes into history?
After the upheaval of the English Civil War and the beheading of Charles I, many of van Dyck’s portraits of fled and dead aristocrats were auctioned off in the Commonwealth sales of 1649–51 (a scant eight years after the artist’s death). As guest curator Adam Eaker writes in his catalog essay for the exhibition, “A Taste For Van Dyck,” “Beginning with the English Civil War, the cataclysms of European history have repeatedly flooded the art market with portraits by van Dyck freshly unmoored from aristocratic collections. Their acquisition by ambitious new elites, whether in Restoration London, post-Revolution Paris or Gilded Age New York, cemented van Dyck’s status as the portraitist of an aristocratic identity that lent itself to ready appropriation.”
Absent bloodlines, the elites who sought — and seek — to appropriate identities draw different lines, the kinds of imaginary lines we draw between stars in constellations. These lines confer status by association, confer taste, confirm wealth, success, proper noblesse oblige to culture and, at times, suggest a nostalgia for simpler antebellum worlds with what seems to these elites to have been a natural aristocratic order. Where van Dyck’s portraits humanize the highborn and illustrious, their legacy of ownership in the intervening centuries united owners not with the sitters as people, but with the sitters as titles, against the rest of us, who, if we are invited, may enjoy the privilege of gazing on them. Now, in a museum setting, open to the public, we can once again see the people in the portraits, trace their histories and marvel at the artist’s skill in capturing them for the ages.
Look no further than the portrait of “Queen Henrietta Maria with Sir Jeffrey Hudson,” the court dwarf, painted in 1633. While the queen attempts to preserve her royal mien, she holds back the monkey that seems to terrify Sir Jeffrey. Has a pose broken because the monkey won’t cooperate? Is the queen, clearly in control here, protecting the dwarf? Is his terror amusing? Is van Dyck making a statement about the role of dwarves and artists and everyone else whose livelihood — and life — depended on the smiling favor of the court? This is the mystery of the moment.
In a different mode, consider the 1637 oil sketch “The Princesses Elizabeth and Anne, Daughters of Charles I.” What van Dyck expresses here is the universal wonder that small children feel when they hold their baby brothers and sisters and the adoration and immediate attachment that the babies seem to feel for their older siblings. Remove the names, change the clothes a bit and this could be a scene in any maternity ward. Only the string of pearls that catches the little one’s eye hints at the status of the older girl. Great portraits bounce us back and forth between then and now, us and them, drawing lines that have nothing to do with blood or status or taste. Great portraits have everything to do with what makes us all unique, and uniquely human.
Once, some years ago, I rescued some small photo albums and loose photos from the junk that had been put out into the street after a small antiques shop had closed. There are no names on any of them. No dates. A few have labels naming the studio and city where they were taken. I take them out and look at them from time to time, wondering who these people were and when the moment came that they were severed from their families. Had their names and stories been forgotten? Had their lines come to an end? Many of them are straightforward portraits. I look at them and move on. But a few are haunting in some way, as if the photographer, a century ago or more, had caught them in the act of unveiling something of their inner lives and light. And I wonder as I look at them whether anything of me will outlive my name, history, genealogy. Will any portrait of me, in whatever form that takes — image, story, deed — grasp anything of me, the real me, whoever that is?
The exhibition’s guest curator at the Frick Collection is Adam Eaker. The exhibition catalog, co-published with Yale University Press, features contributions by the curators as well as An Van Camp, Ashmolean Museum; Bert Watteeuw, Rubenianum, Antwerp; and Xavier F. Salomon, the Frick Collection. A number of programs, gallery talks and events related to the exhibition continue through May.
The Frick Collection is at 1 East 70th Street. For information, www.frick.org or 212-288-0700.
