Alfred Moir, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of Caravaggio, also in the Masters of Art Series, has written a compelling study of the seventeenth-century Flemish painter and his oeuvre. It is illustrated with 81 black-and-white reproductions of works by Van Dyck and influential works by other painters, notably Rubens and Titian. Forty full-page color-plates are each accompanied by a commentary about the work, its genesis, its meaning, and its place in Van Dyck's oeuvre.
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Anthony Van Dyck's painting has tended to suffer from two particularly powerful assumptions. Firstly, that he never escaped the shadow of his great mentor Rubens, and secondly that his work slavishly glorified the ultimately doomed reign of the Stuart King Charles I. Robin Blake's meticulous biography of the Dutch painter, Anthony Van Dyck--A Life goes a long way towards questioning these assumptions about Van Dyck, offering instead a much more complex and sympathetic portrait of his life and work.
Part of the challenge of Blake's biography lies in his admission that Van Dyck "is astonishingly elusive. Like Shakespeare, Van Dyck was greatly celebrated in his time, yet gaps in what we know are like chasms". The result is a great deal of painstaking and detailed local colour, including Van Dyck's early years in Antwerp, his apprenticeship to Rubens, the first mysterious sojourn to England, and subsequent trips to the artistic Holy Grail of Italy. Despite Blake's admirable attempts to offer a more comprehensive, European perspective on Van Dyck, the best sections of the book come in its last hundred pages, which examine Van Dyck's triumphant return to London in 1632, his magnificent paintings of the Stuart court and his extraordinary relationship with Charles I. Blake vividly captures Van Dyck's opulent and prestigious position in the midst of the intrigues of Stuart court society, offering suggestive readings of many of Van Dyck's late portraits and religious works. However, as Blake suggests from the outset, Van Dyck the man tends to get lost in the midst of his prolific output, hidden behind the canvas, just out of view of the grasp of even the most tenacious biographer. Nevertheless, for those interested in Van Dyck, Robin Blake's study is set to become the definitive biography in English for some time to come. --Jerry Brotton --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
A lively biography...a highly personal account, which makes up for the sparseness of the written record...well told.--Theodore K. Rabb, "Times Literary Supplement"
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
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Brilliant!
25 April 2000
By Darren R. Rousar
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
This is by far the best bio on van Dyck in print today. I purchased it a year ago, from Amazon UK, and am very glad to see it available in the States. If you have the catalog from either the recent show in London or the Washington DC show from '90, use the images from that to go with Robin's text and you're in for a real treat. Bravo Robin!
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
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Highly recommended for students of portraiture.
9 May 2000
By Midwest Book Review
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
Robin Blake's Anthony Van Dyck could also have been featured in our arts section but is a powerful biographical sketch which should not be missed by any interested in biographical history. Van Dyck was a portrait painter who saw his own works passed over in favor of his contemporaries, although they were compared to Titian and Rubens. Blake examines Van Dyck's life and art with an eye to revealing the underlying influences on his works; in the process imparting a fine bit of history. Recommended for any student of portraiture.
Diane C. Donovan Reviewer
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