Word: dyck
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...costumes, also by Georgiadis and supervised by Anna Watkins, are breathtaking, not only sumptuous but redolent of a royal fantasy. The stage is filled with personages who could stroll the mirrored corridors of a palace. The Queen, for instance, wears a lyrical ivory silk dress, inspired by a Van Dyck portrait of Charles I's French wife, to her child's 16th birthday party; when she wakes from a magic spell a century later, she is in an 18th century pannier court costume to preside at the wedding...
Auguste Rodin called John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) the "Van Dyck of our times." Sargent was the unrivaled recorder of male power and female beauty in a day that, like ours, paid obsessive court to both. He could make old money look dashing and paint the newest cotton-reel magnate as though he were descended from Bayard. Sixty years after his death, his "paughtraits" (as Sargent, who kept swearing he would give them up but never did, disparagingly called them) provoke unabashed nostalgia. In his Belle Epoque sirens, in the mild, arrogant masks of his Edwardian gentry, are preserved...
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...
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...
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...