Sir Anthony van Dyck (; Dutch: Antoon van Dijck [ˈɑntoːɱ‿vɑn ˈdɛik]; 22 March 1599 – 9 December 1641) was a Flemish Baroque artist, who became the leading court painter in England after success in the Spanish Netherlands and Italy.
The seventh child of Frans van Dyck, a wealthy silk merchant in Antwerp, Anthony painted from an early age. He was successful as an independent painter in his late teens and became a master in the Guild of Saint Luke of Antwerp on 18 October 1617. By this time, he was working in the studio of the leading northern painter of the day, Peter Paul Rubens, who became a major influence on his work.
Van Dyck worked in London for some months in 1621, then returned to Flanders for a brief time, before travelling to Italy, where he stayed until 1627, mostly in Genoa. In the late 1620s he completed his greatly admired Iconography series of portrait etchings of mainly other artists and other famous contemporaries. He spent five years in Flanders after his return from Italy, and from 1630 was court painter for the Archduchess Isabella, Habsburg Governor of Flanders. At the request of Charles I he returned in 1632 to London as the main court painter.
With the exception of Holbein, van Dyck and his contemporary Diego Velázquez were the first painters of pre-eminent talent to work mainly as court portraitists, revolutionising the genre. Van Dyck is best known for his portraits of the aristocracy, most notably Charles I, and his family and associates. He was the dominant influence on English portrait-painting for over 150 years. He also painted mythological, allegorical and biblical subjects, including altarpieces, displayed outstanding facility as a draughtsman, and was an important innovator in watercolour and etching.
His influence extends into the modern period. The Van Dyke beard is named after him. During his lifetime, Charles I granted him a knighthood, and he was buried in St Paul's Cathedral, an indication of his standing at the time of his death.
Anthony van Dyck was born in Antwerp on 22 March 1599 as the seventh of 12 children of his parents. He was baptised the next day in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk (now the Antwerp Cathedral). His father was Francoïs "Frans" van Dijck, a well-to-do silk merchant. His mother, Frans' second wife, was Maria Cupers, the daughter of Dirk Cupers and Catharina Conincx. Anthony was baptised on 23 March 1599 (as Anthonis van Dijck). His parental grandfather, also called Anthoni, had commenced his career as a painter and had been registered in 1556 as a master painter at the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke as a pupil of Jan Ghendrick, alias van Cleve. The elder brother of Anthony's grandfather was also admitted to the Guild as a master painter and had studied with Geert Ghendrick. He had later become a successful merchant in silk and small writing articles. He had bought the house where Anthony was born, a property known as Den Berendans ('The Bear Dance'), situated on Antwerp's Grote Markt (main square) in 1579. On Anthony's mother's family there were also a several artists who were Guild members.
After the birth of Anthony, his family moved to a house called the Kasteel van Rijssel ('Castle of Lille') in the city's Korte Nieuwstraat. His mother died when he was only 8 years old. At that time the family was living in a more luxurious house in the same street called the Stadt van Ghent ('City of Ghent').
Anthony's artistic talent became evident very early on. When he was 10 years old, he began formal training as a painter with Hendrick van Balen the Elder. Hendrick was a successful painter of small cabinet paintings who had several pupils. It is not known how long Anthony studied with van Balen, with estimates varying from two to four years. While it was common for apprentices to stay on in their master's workshop until they were formally registered as a master in the local guild, van Dyck is believed to have left his master's workshop in 1615 or 1616 to set up his independent workshop before he became a master. The reason was that in that period his father was experiencing financial difficulties and would have needed any assistance he could get. It may have been at this time that the young van Dyck may have started painting the series of panels of Christ and the Apostles in bust-length, although it is also possible that he undertook this only after returning from his first visit to Italy in 1620–21.
By the age of fifteen he was already a highly accomplished artist, as shown by his Self-portrait dated 1613–14. He was admitted to the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke as a free master on Saint Luke's day, 18 October 1617.
Within a few years he became the chief assistant to Peter Paul Rubens, the leading master painter of Antwerp and indeed of all Northern Europe. Rubens operated a large workshop and often relied on sub-contracted artists. His influence on the young artist was immense and for his part Rubens referred to the nineteen-year-old van Dyck as "the best of my pupils".
The origins and exact nature of the relationship Dyck had with Rubens are unclear. It has been speculated that van Dyck was a pupil of Rubens from about 1613, as even his early work shows little trace of van Balen's style, but there is no clear evidence for this.
Certainly, the dominance of Rubens in Antwerp, a relatively small and declining city, could explain why, despite periodic returns to the city, van Dyck spent most of his career abroad. In 1620, in Rubens's contract for the major commission for the ceiling of the Carolus Borromeuskerk, the Jesuit church at Antwerp (lost to fire in 1718), van Dyck is named as one of the "discipelen" who was to execute the paintings to Rubens' designs. Unlike van Dyck, Rubens worked for most of the courts of Europe, but avoided exclusive attachment to any of them.
In 1620, at the instigation of George Villiers, Marquess of Buckingham, van Dyck went to England for the first time where he worked for King James I of England, receiving £100. It was in London in the collection of the Earl of Arundel that he first saw the work of Titian, whose use of colour and subtle modelling of form would prove transformational, offering a new stylistic language that would enrich the compositional lessons van Dyck had learned from Rubens.
Returned to Flanders after about four months, van Dyke then left in late 1621 for Italy, where he remained for six years. There he studied the Italian masters while starting a successful career as a portraitist. He was already presenting himself as a figure of consequence, annoying the rather bohemian colony of Northern artists in Rome, as Giovan Pietro Bellori recounts, appearing with "the pomp of Zeuxis ... his behaviour was that of a nobleman rather than an ordinary person, and he shone in rich garments. Since he was accustomed in the circle of Rubens to noblemen, and being naturally of elevated mind, and anxious to make himself distinguished, he therefore wore, as well as silks, a hat with feathers and brooches, gold chains across his chest, and was accompanied by servants."
While mostly based in Genoa, he also travelled extensively to other cities, and stayed for some time in Palermo, in Sicily, where he was quarantined during the 1624 plague, one of the worst in the island's history. There he produced an important series of paintings of the city's plague saint Saint Rosalia. His depictions of a young woman with flowing blonde hair wearing a Franciscan cowl and reaching down toward the imperilled city of Palermo, became the standard iconography of the saint from then onward and was extremely influential for Italian Baroque painters, from Luca Giordano to Pietro Novelli. Versions include those in Madrid, Houston, London, New York and Palermo, as well as Saint Rosalia Interceding for the City of Palermo in Puerto Rico, and Coronation of Saint Rosalia in Vienna. Van Dyck's series of St. Rosalia paintings have been studied by Gauvin Alexander Bailey and Xavier F. Salomon, both of whom curated or co-curated exhibitions devoted to the theme of Italian art and the plague. In 2020, the New York Times published an article about the Metropolitan Museum of Art's painting of Saint Rosalia by Van Dyck in the context of the COVID-19 virus.