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In Washington one gets a full sense of his range, which was very large, from formal to intimate portraiture, from state commemoration to religious allegory. His big religious paintings, mostly for Flemish churches, are bravura performances, but none of them have the trumpeting conviction or the sheer inventiveness of Rubens'. His best paintings were his portraits and his secular allegories, like Rinaldo and Armida, 1629, done under the spell of Titian. Taken from Tasso's epic poem Jerusalem Delivered, a great favorite at Charles' court, it illustrates the moment when the sorceress Armida falls in love with the wandering Christian knight Rinaldo on glimpsing his sleeping face. The sensuous color, the glow of flesh and even the eyeline of the scene -- shot, as it were, from slightly below -- recall the Titians and Veroneses that Van Dyck had avidly studied in Venice seven years before; the flutter of Armida's red cloak, a discreet image of erotic turmoil, recalls the love god's cloak in Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne.
Van Dyck was truly a painter's painter. There is nothing intimidating about his work, as there often is about Rubens'. He loved private character and painted the interplay between that character and the public mask with a sensitivity that few artists have rivaled since. Sometimes he would seem to have done this by guesswork. His 1633 portrait of Henry Percy, "the Wizard Earl" who spent 16 years of his life immured in the Tower of London for his supposed complicity in the Gunpowder Plot, is an icon of saturnine intellect, from the same introspective domain as Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. But Van Dyck probably never met Percy, who died in 1632; he was working from a younger portrait by someone else.
Van Dyck loved the stuff of the world -- the shimmer and exact texture of fabrics (he was, after all, the son of a silk merchant in Antwerp), the brightness of flesh or the passing melancholy that settles on a face, the layering of vapor and light in the sky, the sheen of armor. In this sense of lavishness he was, of course, very much Titian's heir, and it is wonderful to see how much pictorial interest he could discover in inert substances -- particularly the brocades and velvets worn by his sitters -- in the course of translating them into patches and trails of pigment on canvas. He endowed the gold damascened parade armor of Emmanuel Philiberto of Savoy with a density of inspection that makes you feel you could lift it off the canvas if the prince were not wearing it.
The mark of Van Dyck's style is its extraordinary refinement, a delicacy that runs counter to what English 17th century taste had come to expect from Holland: "robustious boistrous druncken headed imaginary Gods," as Charles I's agent in Brussels remarked when trying to decide on an artist from whom to commission a story of Cupid and Psyche.