Anthony Van Dyke

Anthony Van Dyke is Robin Blake's 1999 Yale University Press art-historical biography of the seventeenth-century Flemish portrait painter (1599-1641) and his English court career under Charles I. Blake (the British art historian and crime novelist of the Cragg and Fidelis mysteries) draws on the full surviving documentary record of Van Dyke's life and the substantial scholarly literature on his portrait practice.

Blake's structural method is to alternate between the conventional biographical narrative (the Antwerp early career, the Italian sketchbooks, the Charles I court appointment, the death at Blackfriars) and the studio-and-practice analysis (the workshop logistics, the patronage relationships, the influence on later British portrait practice from Reynolds through Sargent). The Charles I court chapters are the strongest part of the volume; the Italian sketchbook chapters are the most original. The Yale University Press edition includes 120 plates.

Recommended for serious students of Dutch and Flemish baroque painting, for English court historians, and for readers of books like Anthony Van Dyke in the major-Yale-art-monograph tradition (Christopher Brown's Rubens, Susan Foister's Holbein and England). Four solid stars and one of the standard references.