Family Portrait(Anthony Van Dyck, Sir)
Test The present unidentified Family Portrait shows a lady wearing a black dress with a white ruff and cap and she is sitting on a chair in front of a curtain. A little child in white, to whom a little girl or boy in black wearing a white cap is about to embrace sits on the lady’s lap and seems to be refusing the elder childs approach. Beside her stands her husband his left arm resting on the chair while his right arm encourages the eldest child or he’s just got up to introduce us to his own family. He is shown wearing a lace collar and a felt hat.
Family portrait formats usually derive from religious imagery. While this group could easily be converted into a representation of the Holy Family with St. John the Baptist Van Dyck’s work seems to have been influenced by another group portrait, specifically Rubens’ portrait of The Family of Jan Breughel the Elder in the Courtauld Institute Galleries. Van Dyck has kept the position of the elder Breughels, he has adapted tie single figure 3/4 length portrait by retaining the curtain and the landscape background and has introduced in the centre of the composition a most charming scene between children. The naturalness with which the children’s emotions and gestures have been rendered shows Van Dyck’s acute observation and superlative understanding of children’s reactions. The importance of capturing the spontaneity of the sibling’s hug is emphasized by enclosing it within a circle formed by the parents’ heads and hands. It is also the spontaneity of the father’s action into the composition by which Van Dyck tries to communicate the warmth of domestic life. However, the mother does not seem to participate in the whole, indifferent to the children’s actions.
Van Dyck’s attempt to depict a tight unit of a lively family group is successfully done in a closely related work. The Family Group in Leningrad, identified by various authors as the portrait of Jan Wildens and his Family presents the same format except there is now only one child. The child sits on the mother’s lap turning momentarily his head to the father. The child’s pose together with the head of the young parents bind the composition stronger than our painting. In the Leningrad picture the artist feels no need to establish a convincing impression of depth. The mother, father and child, whose outlines are very close to the edges of the canvas are shown in a shallow space that they seem to fall out. Van Dyck has deliberately introduced the odd angle of the embossed leather chair to give an effect of instability which adds immediacy and liveliness to the group.
We believe that the present painting represents the earliest of both experiments in intimate domestic portraiture prior to his departure to Italy (1621). Van Dyck conscious of the lack of effectiveness of the whole brought in the later Leningrad picture the members of the family onto the surface of the canvas, making each figure participate into the composition at the cost of depth but nearer to the spectators’ reach.
Van Dyck’s perceptive observation in the portrayal of children must have been acquired through the study of alive models or derived from his own experiments in historical paintings such as Suffer Little Children to Come Unto Me. This last painting has been suggested as a possible portrait of the Rubens family. If so, Van Dyck had many opportunities to study Rubens~ children when he started to work in Rubens’ studio or consciously observing them for the former religious canvas, obtaining an extremely sharp understanding of children’s behaviour.
The painting seems to have been popular in the seventeenth century. The catalogue of the Cook collection mentions copies in the collection of Baron Janssen, Uccle, now considered a copy after the Van Dyck in the Cook collection, another in the Freslingh sale, Berlin, 1895, now attributed to Cornelis de Vos, and in the Wedewer sale, Berlin, 1908, now considered a Jordaens.
Recently information has come to light showing that Goëring made strenuous attempts to buy this painting during the War for an enormous amount of money. Despite protracted negotiations in several currencies the bid to purchase failed and the ownership of the painting therefore was not placed in dispute (see certificate from the Art Loss Register and subsequent research).
Sir Francis Cook, Doughty House, Richmond;
Sir Frederick Cook, Richmond;
Sir Herbert Cook, Richmond;
Emil Georg Bührle, Zurich;
Family Bührle, Munich;
Private Collection, La Hougue Die, Jersey, Channel Islands.
H. Cook, ‘La Collection de Sir Frederick Cook’, Les Arts, 1905, vol XLIV, p. 26.
W. Bode, Rembrandt und seine Ze!tgenossen, Leipzig, 1907, p. 271.
E. Schaeffer, Klassiker der Kunst: Van Dyck, Leipzig and Stuttgart, 1909, p. 157.
J. O. Kronig, A Catalogue of Paintings at Doughty House, Richmond, 1914, vol 11, p.34 note 254, p1. XI.
W. Bode, Die Meister der hollandische und flamishen Malerschulen, Leipzig, 1919, p. 348.
W. Drost, Barockmalerei in den Germanischen Landen, Potsdam, 1926, p. 64.
C. Cluck, Klassiker der Kunst: Van Dyck, Stuttgart and Berlin, 1931, p. 112.
P. Imbourg, Van Dyck, Monaco, 1949, p1. 23 (a copy, incorrectly described as this painting).
L. van Puyvelde, Van Dyck, Brussels, 1950, p. 125.
F. Lanfer, Review of the Bührle Collection, exhibition, Schweizer Journal, 1955, illus. p. 50.
H. Vlieghe, ‘Het portret van Jan Brueghel en zun gezin door P. P. Rubens’, Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bulletin, 1966, vol XV, p. 186, fig 8.
E. Waterhouse, Suffer Little Children to Come Unto Me, Ottawa, 1978, p.22, fig 12.
E. Larsen, LOpera Completa di Van Dyck, 2 vols, Milan, 1980, no. 75.
E. Larsen, The Paintings of Anthony Van Dyck, 2 vols, Freren, 1988, no. 84.
The painting has recently been viewed by Christopher Brown and Sir Oliver Miller who have confirmed the dating.
It will be fully published as an early autograph work in the new Complete Works of Van Dyck in preparation under the co-authorship of Prof. Horst Vey and Nora de Poorter, who will write the entry. In addition Dr Christopher Brown has given notice that he will be publishing the painting in a new volume on Van Dyck which he is preparing and he recently inspected the painting at first hand.
Several…….