Anthony can Dyck was a Flemish artist who became the leading court painter in England. He is most famous for his portraits of Charles I of England (1600 – 1649), his family and court, painted with a relaxed elegance that was to be the dominant influence on English portrait-painting for the next 150 years. He also painted biblical and mythological subjects, displayed outstanding facility as a draftsman, and was an important innovator in watercolour and etching.
His talent was evident very early, and he was studying painting with Hendrick van Balen by 1609, and became an independent painter around 1615, setting up a workshop with his even younger friend Jan Brueghel the Younger . Even at the age of fifteen he was already a highly accomplished artist and was eventually admitted to the Antwerp painters' Guild of Saint Luke as a free master by February 1618. Van Dyck became and assistant with Peter Paul Rubens and his influence on the young artist was immense; Rubens referred to the nineteen-year-old van Dyck as 'the best of my pupils'.
From 1620 to 1627 van Dyck traveled in Italy, where he was in great demand as a portraitist and where he developed his maturing style. He toned down the Flemish robustness of his early work to concentrate on a more dignified, elegant manner. In his portraits of Italian aristocrats—men on prancing horses, ladies in black gowns—he created idealized figures with proud, erect stances, slender figures, and the famous expressive “van Dyck” hands. Influenced by the great Venetian painters Titian, Paolo Veronese, and Giovanni Bellini, he adopted colors of great richness and jewel-like purity. No other painter of the age surpassed van Dyck at portraying the shimmering whites of satin, the smooth blues of silk, or the rich crimsons of velvet. He was the quintessential painter of aristocracy, and was particularly successful in Genoa. There he showed himself capable of creating brilliantly accurate likenesses of his subjects, while he also developed a repertoire of portrait types that served him well in his later work at the court of Charles I of England.
Van Dyck was one of the most influential 17th-century painters. He set a new style for Flemish art and founded the English school of painting; the portraitists Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough of that school were his artistic heirs. He died in London on December 9, 1641.