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Van Dyck was not given to theorizing, but an intriguing phrase crops up in his scattered writings: he wanted to achieve, he said, een loechte maniere, "an airy style." In the process, writes Jeffrey M. Muller in the catalog, he "intentionally formed a style representative of grace." Grace meant facility, apparent ease, but in no superficial way: a style analogous to the poise and manners of the true gentleman, a conception of human character that was forming at the Stuart court even as he worked there and was thought to radiate from the person of the King. Let the French have their Roi Soleil, a periwigged divinity; Van Dyck would give the court an iconography of kingship that was, if not exactly informal, at least more humanly accessible.
When Bernini was to do a sculpture of Charles and would not come to England, it was Van Dyck who supplied the "natural" image of the King -- three faces, looking left, right and straight ahead -- from which the Roman artist was to work. Van Dyck's portraits of Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria fixed them for posterity with a completion that few later artists could rival. They have the subtlest quality of propaganda: they make you forget that they are propaganda. If we think of Charles as the cultivated king par excellence, it is largely thanks to Van Dyck. There cannot be a more tender and intimate royal portrait than his effigy of the couple in conversation in a rocky landscape, their bonding signified by, among other things, their dress -- he in pink slashed silk with pale gray showing beneath, she in the same gray with pink ribbons and laces; he giving her an olive twig, she giving him a laurel wreath.
Here and elsewhere in this excellent show, one sees Van Dyke chasing the Tudor stiffness out of painting, inventing the conventions of future English portraiture, the tropes on which Gainsborough, Reynolds and even Sargent would continually draw. The court he served was the most sophisticated one England would ever have. He did not outlive it; it was collapsing as he lay dying at the end of 1641. But Van Dyck had already changed English art decisively, and much for the better.