Sir Anthony van Dyck

Anthony van Dyck was painting professionally as a teenager and working in Rubens’s studio not long after. The debt to Rubens is obvious in the early religious pictures, all muscle and movement, but van Dyck’s real gift turned out to be portraiture, and specifically a kind of portraiture nobody had quite done before.

His sitters stand at ease, hands loose, silks catching light, heads tilted slightly away. Nothing looks posed even though all of it is. Genoa gave him aristocrats to practise on during the 1620s. England gave him Charles I, who knighted him and kept him busy until his death in 1641.

The English portraits set the template that Gainsborough, Reynolds and Lawrence worked from for the next two centuries. That influence has slightly overshadowed the man himself. The late self-portraits, and the etchings he made of fellow artists, show someone far more restless than the courtly output suggests.