On the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of Van Dyck in Blackfriars in 1641, the artist was the subject of almost the whole of this Magazine’s issue of December 1941 – admittedly a rather thin wartime number. Among the articles is a short appreciation by Sacheverell Sitwell of Van Dyck’s contribution to portraiture, in particular the forging of the image of the cavalier and its echoes through later European art and literature; Leo van Puyvelde writes of how Van Dyck was not at all ‘the docile pupil of Rubens’ of popular myth and in good Burlington style examines the actual wording of contemporary documents to refine the picture of Van Dyck as a precocious painter who would ‘collaborate’ with Rubens, and was no mere studio slave. There follows Paul Oppé on the phenomenon of Van Dyck as an English painter, quoting Horace Walpole as commenting that ‘our people can scarce avoid thinking of him [as] their countryman’. Gustav Glück, author of the Klassiker der Kunst volume on Van Dyck, repudiates the popular idea of the painter as a serial seducer of a number of his female sitters, for which he finds no evidence at all. His text is chiefly an excuse for publishing for the first time a Portrait of a lady owned by a gentleman in Oklahoma City. This makes no appearance in the Complete Catalogue (2004) beyond a mention as ‘not by Van Dyck’.1 Lastly, Tancred Borenius, the Magazine’s acting editor, introduces with considerably more flourish than probability some Van Dyck ‘discoveries’. The Editorial, almost certainly also written by Bor­enius, ends on a plangent note remarking how Van Dyck links the two nations, England and Flanders (then under German occupation), which ‘stand united in defence of the highest values of life’.

By that time, Van Dyck’s name had become synonymous with a concept of Englishness that was potent both in Britain and abroad. In his 1941 article, Sitwell stresses the Van Dyckian component of the national self-image, alongside the contributions of Shakespeare and Dickens. Today, while we might not concur so enthusiastically with this estimate, we have had in recent decades exhibitions and publications that have enhanced his standing not only as a major European artist but as a pivotal figure in the development of British painting. The latest exam­ination of his years in London was Tate Britain’s exhibition Van Dyck & Britain in 2009. There the narrative extended right up to Sargent with works exemplifying Van Dyck’s impact from the 1630s onwards, particularly of course on portraiture, specifically in the work of Gainsborough and Lawrence.

As such a famous and influential figure, an image of Van Dyck was conspicuously absent from the walls of the National Portrait Gallery. None seemed available until an opportunity presented itself with the sale at Sotheby’s in 2010 of Van Dyck’s last self-portrait (Fig.I), a little-known painting (of which there are several later versions by other hands)2 which had, however, received good pre-sale publicity, as it were, in the Tate Britain exhibition (cat. no.67). The NPG seemed unable to make a move and the painting was sold well above estimate to a London dealer for over £8 million and was acquired for over £12 million by a British collector who intended to take the picture to the United States. But an export licence was not granted by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art: the painting more than satisfied the Waverley Criteria as to the work’s national, aesthetic and historical significance. An appeal was then launched by the National Portrait Gallery and the Art Fund and the price was revised to £10 million. The appeal was a huge success by any standards and included major pledges from the Art Fund, the Monument Trust and the Heritage Lottery Fund as well as innumerable private donations. On 1st May the Gallery was able to announce the painting had been ‘saved’. While it is perhaps the most expensive work acquired by the Gallery in recent decades, it is also among its finest portraits.

The artist’s pose, looking over his shoulder, is seen in the earlier self-portrait etching made for his Iconography, that ambitious gallery of notables begun by Van Dyck c.1628; and he assumed it again in the Self-portrait with a sunflower (1633). But here, the turn of the head towards the viewer produces a quite sharp sense of alertness; and the just perceptible tilt backwards of the figure, a certain diffidence. Perhaps too there is a note of anxiety. We may read as much or as little as we like into this of self-interrogation. Here is the ‘principalle Paynter’ to a king whose authority was already under siege; a man conscious of growing ill-health; one who is aware perhaps of the limitations imposed on his art by narrow English patronage. All we can truly see is the artist’s inviolable solitariness at a moment when he is painting entirely for himself, steeped in a deep but contained emotion.

1    S.J. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey: Van Dyck. A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven and London 2004, p.307.
2    One of these versions was reproduced as the frontispiece to the Burlington’s 1941 issue on Van Dyck; another, with the erroneous addition of Peter Lely’s monogram, was reproduced inside, opposite p.194.