Word: dyck
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...Dyck was truly a painter's painter. There is nothing intimidating about his work, as there often is about Rubens'. He loved private character and painted the interplay between that character and the public mask with a sensitivity that few artists have rivaled since. Sometimes he would seem to have done this by guesswork. His 1633 portrait of Henry Percy, "the Wizard Earl" who spent 16 years of his life immured in the Tower of London for his supposed complicity in the Gunpowder Plot, is an icon of saturnine intellect, from the same introspective domain as Robert Burton...
...Dyck loved the stuff of the world -- the shimmer and exact texture of fabrics (he was, after all, the son of a silk merchant in Antwerp), the brightness of flesh or the passing melancholy that settles on a face, the layering of vapor and light in the sky, the sheen of armor. In this sense of lavishness he was, of course, very much Titian's heir, and it is wonderful to see how much pictorial interest he could discover in inert substances -- particularly the brocades and velvets worn by his sitters -- in the course of translating them into patches...
...mark of Van Dyck's style is its extraordinary refinement, a delicacy that runs counter to what English 17th century taste had come to expect from Holland: "robustious boistrous druncken headed imaginary Gods," as Charles I's agent in Brussels remarked when trying to decide on an artist from whom to commission a story of Cupid and Psyche...
...Dyck was not given to theorizing, but an intriguing phrase crops up in his scattered writings: he wanted to achieve, he said, een loechte maniere, "an airy style." In the process, writes Jeffrey M. Muller in the catalog, he "intentionally formed a style representative of grace." Grace meant facility, apparent ease, but in no superficial way: a style analogous to the poise and manners of the true gentleman, a conception of human character that was forming at the Stuart court even as he worked there and was thought to radiate from the person of the King. Let the French have...
When Bernini was to do a sculpture of Charles and would not come to England, it was Van Dyck who supplied the "natural" image of the King -- three faces, looking left, right and straight ahead -- from which the Roman artist was to work. Van Dyck's portraits of Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria fixed them for posterity with a completion that few later artists could rival. They have the subtlest quality of propaganda: they make you forget that they are propaganda. If we think of Charles as the cultivated king par excellence, it is largely thanks to Van Dyck. There...