King Charles I of England had several court painters, not all equally lucky. Anthony van Dyck was the luckiest of all. But how could one envy, say, Richard Gibson? He was not only a miniaturist but a dwarf who at a court banquet had to skip from a pie and walk the length of the table bearing portraits of the King and Queen he had copied after Van Dyck on playing cards. It cannot have been fun to be this small, if distinct, talent, awaiting his cue in a dark pastry coffin. But to be Van Dyck himself? A different matter.
A child prodigy at 14, a full professional by his early 20s and dead at 42, Van Dyck had one of those careers that is conventionally dubbed meteoric -- except that it did not burn out. His name has lasted three centuries. Which is not to say that he has altogether received his due. In a curious way, Van Dyck remains a somewhat underrated artist, as anyone might if he had to be constantly compared with Rubens, his master, and Titian, his even greater model. Especially, he is not well known to the American public, though some of his finest paintings are in America, owing to the vogue for his portraits among the robber barons of the early 20th century. Those who saw "Van Dyck in England," organized by Oliver Millar for the National Portrait Gallery in $ London eight years ago, are not likely to forget the impact of its high- strung, cool virtuosity. But the show did not travel to the U.S., and so the Van Dyck exhibition now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, curated with such care and scholarly zest by three art historians -- Susan J. Barnes, Julius S. Held and Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. -- offers many people their first proper look at this artist.
Van Dyck covered a lot of territory in his short life. He was Rubens' most gifted assistant in Antwerp, and his early ability to reproduce the style of his idol has led to prolonged squabbles over the attribution of some of his early paintings. What they leave no doubt of is Van Dyck's precocity, the speed with which he metabolized the lessons of his master. In 1620, when he was only 21, he was hired by King James I as a court painter in London. A year later he was in Genoa, painting its nobles and dignitaries, making study trips to Rome, Florence and Palermo. By 1627 he was back in Antwerp, and by 1632 the new English monarch, Charles I, had brought him back to London, knighted him and made him "principalle Paynter in ordinary to their Majesties." For his last 10 years he moved between London, Antwerp and Paris, accumulating honors, commissions and fame. All in all, he was as genuinely international a painter as Rubens had been, though he did not fly at quite the same diplomatic height.