Studio of Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Portrait of King Charles I

Studio of Sir Anthony Van Dyck
Portrait of King Charles I
c.1638-9
oil-on-canvas
30 x 25 in.

Provenance
Private collection, UK;
Whiteman’s Fine Art, 2025.

Note
This impressively martial portrait of Charles I is a high quality bust variant of the likeness of the king painted by Van Dyck in 1638-9. The prototype of this portrait is the large equestrian painting showing Charles mounted in full plate armour with a squire offering up his helmet for battle now in the National Gallery, London. Painted on the eve of civil war it is one of Van Dyck’s most metaphysical portraits, displaying the king in control of nature as much of the realm. It is the largest portrait of Charles I by Van Dyck and places the sitter in a royal and imperial portrait tradition beginning with the famous bronze statue of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius at Rome, which would have flattered the king’s pretensions of ruling without Parliament as his period of absolute ‘Personal Rule’ was coming to a close [1].

The portrait became one of the defining images of Charles and the Stuart dynasty and demand by his royalist supporters for reduced engravings, as well as further reduced bust versions of a more universally hangable size, was considerable. The present high quality portrait, as a work painted in Van Dyck’s studio under the artist’s supervision, would have formed part of the range of portraits produced for Charles and his court for various political and diplomatic reasons. The king was passionate about art and was the first British monarch to collect art for its own sake. Ever since his youthful (and comically quixotic) mission to Spain in 1623 to secure the marriage of the King of Spain’s daughter, Charles had dreamed of turning his court into a rival of the great visual displays of Madrid, sparkling with pictures by Titian and Velasquez, as part of a wishful civilising exercise on his disparate and badly administered kingdom. His first route towards that end was to spend lavishly on collections of Old Masters, most notably the Mantua collection secured for about £15,000 in 1628 with the help of Van Dyck’s friend Nicholas Lanier, the ‘Master of the King’s Musick’.(2) Such was Charles’ enthusiasm for buying art that he would often be present at the moment of delivery, insisting that crates delivered at night were immediately unpacked, and playing games of attribution by candlelight.[3]

But it was not enough for Charles to be surrounded by great art; he wanted to be in it. Charles, more than any other English king, fell into the trap of believing that the image of power equated to its reality. The tradition is that when Charles saw Van Dyck’s c.1628 portrait of Nicholas Lanier [Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna] he demanded that the artist be ‘sent for over into England.’[4] Getting Van Dyck to England, however, was no easy task; he needed the inducements of an expensive annual retainer, a studio by the Thames, a large gold chain and a knighthood. There are sixteen recorded varying portrait types or compositions of Charles by Van Dyck and seventeen of his wife, Henrietta Maria. The fact that the majority of these are known both in multiple versions by Van Dyck himself and studio replicas gives a glimpse of how reliant on his talented studio assistants Van Dyck often was.

On one level, the need to circulate Charles I’s image by the best artist possible was obvious – power increases with recognition. In 1504 Henry VII, the first English king to understand the importance of his own image, had the masterstroke of putting his recognisable portrait on the coinage, so that his face was in the pocket and purse of all his subjects. Other images had to visually impress viewers with the majesty and power of the monarch – some who saw Holbein’s 1537 life-size mural of Henry VIII and his family in Whitehall ‘felt abashed, annihilated’, such was its scale and realism.[5] Yet outside the royal palace, royal portraits could assume a subtly different purpose. In private houses, for example, the display of a portrait of Charles I could not only demonstrate the owner’s loyalty to the king but also that they were a person of importance. Inevitably, therefore, there was a considerable demand for replicas of Van Dyck’s royal portraits. The present portrait of Charles I is a fine example of a studio production of a portrait of the king from the peak of Van Dyck’s English career. The head and armoured bust are derived from the famed equestrian portrait of Charles I, yet transform a monumental picture designed for a royal palace into an albeit martial likeness more easily soliciting empathy with the monarch’s person.

Unfortunately, we cannot know which of Van Dyck’s assistants was responsible for the portrait. Unlike Rubens’ studio, we know comparatively little of those Van Dyck employed or what they did. Van Dyck’s studio in Blackfriars lay outside the remit of the City of London and its strict rules on artists and their apprentices. Those whom we believe were employed at some stage in England by Van Dyck include Jan Van Belcamp, Jean de Reyn, David Beek, James Gandy, Henry Stone and Remigius van Leemput.[6]

[1] National Gallery, NG1172.

The painting is the subject of a book by Sir Roy Strong, Van Dyck: King Charles on Horseback (London: Allan Lane, 1972).

[2] The final figure paid for the collection is uncertain. See for example Ian Spink, ‘Lanier in Italy’, in Music & Letters, Vol. 40, no. 3, (July, 1959), pp.242-252.

[3] Charles Carlton, Charles I the Personal Monarch, 2nd edn., (London, 1995), pp.143-144

[4] This phrase comes from a later account noted by Charles Beale after a conversation with Sir Peter Lely and apparently first published by Horace Walpole. See William Hookham Carpenter, ‘Pictorial Notices, consisting of a Memoir of Sir Anthony Van Dyck’, (London, 1844), p.23.

[5] Xanthe Brooke and David Crombie, Henry VIII Revealed, Holbein’s Portrait and its Legacy, exhibition catalogue, January-March 2003, (London, 2003), p.27.

[6] Susan Barnes, Nora De Poorter, Oliver Millar and Horst Vey, Van Dyck – A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings (Yale, New Haven and London, 2004), p.2.