During the past twenty years the public has become so educated in
matters artistic that it wishes at once to definitely assign a certain
position to an artist with whose works it is familiar. We live in an
age of comparison, and as opportunities for its exercise, owing to the
cheapening of travel, are so manifestly improved of recent years, a
more just estimation exists in the mind of the public regarding an
artist's worth than formerly. Van Dyck, as I said at the beginning of
the opening chapter, has never fallen from the high position he
occupied in his own day. He has always appealed to the student and the
artist of every nationality, and if we survey portrait painting since
his day, we shall see that he has exercised more influence than any
other artist who has ever lived. It may be said that Titian, for a
couple of centuries after his death, was the idol almost exclusively
worshipped, and that during the last fifty years Velazquez and
Rembrandt have been the ideals painters have dangled before the public
and themselves. But both of these mighty masters have had their ups
and downs. The genius of Rembrandt was certainly not appreciated until
the end of the eighteenth century, and even then his stupendous powers
were not recognised as they have been in our own day.
The worship of Velazquez is quite a modern institution, and it is not
at all unlikely, in the opinion of well-informed critics, that if his
influence, which has now reached a decadent stage, is not curtailed it
will create as much havoc amongst modern portrait painters as the
example of Constable has had upon certain phases of landscape painting.
It can never be laid to the charge of Van Dyck that any period of his
art has exercised a permanently baneful influence. True, immediately
after the Restoration, a school arose, headed by Sir Peter Lely and Sir
Godfrey Kneller, who claimed to have followed the traditions of Van
Dyck. It requires, however, but little comparison between even his
later and slighter works and those of Lely, who was incomparably the
greatest of the portrait painters working in England in the interval
between Van Dyck and Hogarth, to see how far below Van Dyck's standard
portrait painting had fallen, and how little of his method there was
left in it.
Van Dyck has exercised more influence in England than abroad. Many of
our greatest eighteenth-century portrait painters have largely formed
themselves upon his example. Gainsborough was the most conspicuous
instance of this. From his earliest days he worshipped the great
Fleming, and that the spell never left him may be gauged from his dying
words: "We are all going to Heaven, and Van Dyck is of the company."
Even prior to his departure for Bath, his portraits possessed many of
the qualities of Van Dyck, but after arriving in the western city, then
the centre of a rich and fashionable world, he had manifold
opportunities of studying his favourite master. His brushwork became
at once more refined, his colouring more transparent, and his method in
every way more facile. Before leaving Bath he had produced portraits
which are worthy to be placed alongside those of Van Dyck, and after a
few years' residence in London had created those marvels of the brush
which contend for supremacy with the finest works of the Fleming. For
example, what portrait of the latter master could be cited to surpass
the portrait of Mrs. Graham in the Gallery at Edinburgh, the superb
group at Dulwich, or the "Blue Boy," in the possession of the Duke of
Westminster?
Reynolds appears to have worked more in emulation of Titian than Van
Dyck. He painted in a solider and apparently slower manner, and if the
slickness--if I may be allowed an Americanism--of the Flemish master
appealed to him, it yet had no visible effect upon his own technique.
The minor masters of our school demonstrate materially how much they
owed to Van Dyck. Allan Ramsay and Cotes bear adequate witness of this.
Full justice, however, has not been done to the good wrought for
English art by his immediate followers and pupils. It is only of late
years that the portraits of old Stone are beginning to be sorted out
from those of the later period of Van Dyck. Stone was occupied in
copying or making replicas of the portraits of Van Dyck, and so well
did he succeed in his task that, even to this day, numerous works by
him are to be found in the country houses of England passing under the
name of the great master.
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