Art: Dramas of Self-Presentation

In London, a show of masterly formal portraits by Van Dyck

The peculiar achievement of Sir Anthony van Dyck was to have invented the English gentleman—not the mild, knobbly, pink creature one sees beneath its bowler in the street, but the now vanishing archetype of aristocracy, calm and straight as a Purdey gun barrel, with the look of arrogant security guaranteed to paralyze all lesser breeds from Calais to Peshawar. This invention began in 1632, when Van Dyck, an ex-assistant of the greatest court painter of his age, Peter Paul Rubens, arrived in London....