Yale University Press will be releasing the following publication next month. Van Dyck and the Making of English Portraiture is the latest scholarly work by Adam Eaker, associate curator in the department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and co-curator of the 2016 Frick Collection exhibition on the artist.
According to the book's blurb:
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As a courtier, figure of fashion and object of erotic fascination, Anthony van Dyck transformed the professional identities available to English artists. By making his portrait sittings into a form of courtly spectacle, Van Dyck inspired poets and playwrights at the same time that he offended guardians of traditional hierarchies. A self‑consciously Van Dyckian lineage of artists, many of them women, extends from his lifetime to the end of the eighteenth century and beyond.
Recovering the often surprising responses of both writers and painters to Van Dyck’s portraits, this book provides an alternative perspective on English art’s historical self‑consciousness. Built around a series of close readings of artworks and texts ranging from poems and plays to early biographies and studio gossip, it traces the reception of Van Dyck’s art on the part of artists like Mary Beale, William Hogarth and Richard and Maria Cosway to bestow a historical specificity on the frequent claim that Van Dyck founded an English school of portraiture.
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One of the most recent and outstanding examples of Van Dyck's English portraits to be sold by Sotheby's London was the armoured Portrait of Charles II when Prince of Wales. Sold in 2016, this oil on canvas had formerly been in the famous Townshend collection and then latterly in an English private collection for a century before it was offered for sale in New Bond Street.
