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. It ended with his death at the age of 42, in 1641. In between came seven years of service to the court of Charles I and his wife Queen Henrietta Maria, during which Van Dyck attained the kind of success that few artists of the time could imagine. Inundated with commissions, eulogized by poets, fluent and tireless, he helped set the cultural standards of the Caroline age.

Standing before Van Dyck's work, as a patron wrote to him, one felt "the Luck to be astonish'd in the righte Place." The current exhibition of Van Dyck's English portraits, organized by Art Historian Oliver Millar at the National Portrait Gallery in London, shows how well Van Dyck's fluency has lasted. It is a delectable exhibition, though cramped and clumsily installed, and it makes one realize how far the tradition of formal portraiture has declined since the days when Van Dyck epitomized it.

Certainly, Van Dyck knew how to make his sitters look handsomer than they were. Any cosmetician can do that; it is part of the ordinary transaction that painting and photography have with reality. Before photography, when one's idea of a strange face had to be set up by painting, the disparity between the evidence of the eye and the speech of the brush could sometimes come as a shock. One of Prince Rupert's sisters, who knew Queen Henrietta Maria only through the portraits of Van Dyck, was dismayed to meet a short woman with crooked shoulders, spindly arms, and teeth that stuck out of her mouth "like guns from a fort."

Another of Van Dyck's clients, however, the Countess of Sussex, lamented that he had made her look "very ill-favourede," stout in the cheeks, like one of the winds huffing and blowing. "But truely," she conceded, "I thinke it tis lyke the originale." The fact is that flattery is not a word that can quickly be defined, at least in portraiture. How it is used, what it means, depends on how the sitter feels about himself and how posterity will feel about the sitter. Our own bias, in a post-Freudian age, is toward portraits that show a "truth" about the sitter that the sitter was not willing to admit. But that is not how the portraitists of the 16th, 17th or 18th centuries saw their work.