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拍品专文
Hitherto unpublished, this panel is an intriguing addition to the corpus of portraits painted by van Dyck following his years in Italy and subsequent return to Antwerp in 1627. Painted with the artist’s characteristic vigour, this sensitively captured likeness of a young woman constitutes a rare example of van Dyck employing this support for a portrait. Although his small grisaille oil sketches for his celebrated Iconographie series of prints were executed on panel, there are only a small number of recorded portraits on that support from his second Antwerp period, the years prior to his departure for England in April 1632. Among those are the portrait of Marten Pepijn (1632; Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten), the superb half-lengths of Theodor Rombouts and his wife Anna van Thielen with their daughter Anna Maria (c.1632; both Munich, Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen), two bust-lengths of Peter Snayers (Munich, Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen) and Jan Snellinck (private collection, UK), and the three-quarter-length of Marten Ryckaert (c.1631; Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado), one of the artist’s most remarkable portraits from the period. It is striking that, apart from the portrait of Anna van Thielen and her child, itself a pendant to that of her husband, all these works show van Dyck's fellow artists, then active in his native city and with whom he was presumably on intimate terms. Moreover, perhaps unsurprisingly given their shared profession, there is a decided air of informality prevalent within this group of portraits which suggests that many, particularly the smaller works, were not commissions from the sitters.
It seems highly plausible that the sitter for this rapidly brushed portrait, in which the artist has employed a restrained palette while using the panel ground to great effect, was a member of van Dyck's own household or someone with whom he was well acquainted. The sitter’s conspicuously sober appearance, dressed in a black bodice and sleeves with a plain flat collar, has prompted speculation that she was a servant. However, this theory is seemingly undermined by the absence of a cap to cover her hair, a sartorial detail that was invariably depicted in seventeenth-century portraits of servants to denote their status. Regardless, as with the aforementioned portraits on panel from this period in van Dyck's career, the informal timbre of the present study suggests it was unlikely to have been painted as a commission and may well have been retained by the artist.
The erroneous identification on the reverse of the panel is very probably based on an engraving by Cornelis Visscher, after a portrait by van Dyck, that bears the inscription ‘Helena Leonora de Sieveri’, the wife of the painter and art dealer Hendrick Dubois. A copy of the lost original of Helena by van Dyck, now in the Art Institute of Chicago, shows that while there is a fleeting resemblance to the sitter in the present portrait, this identification is misleading.
We are grateful to Professors Katlijne Van der Stighelen, Hans Vlieghe and Christopher Brown for independently confirming the attribution to van Dyck after inspection of the original and for dating the work between 1628-30.
It seems highly plausible that the sitter for this rapidly brushed portrait, in which the artist has employed a restrained palette while using the panel ground to great effect, was a member of van Dyck's own household or someone with whom he was well acquainted. The sitter’s conspicuously sober appearance, dressed in a black bodice and sleeves with a plain flat collar, has prompted speculation that she was a servant. However, this theory is seemingly undermined by the absence of a cap to cover her hair, a sartorial detail that was invariably depicted in seventeenth-century portraits of servants to denote their status. Regardless, as with the aforementioned portraits on panel from this period in van Dyck's career, the informal timbre of the present study suggests it was unlikely to have been painted as a commission and may well have been retained by the artist.
The erroneous identification on the reverse of the panel is very probably based on an engraving by Cornelis Visscher, after a portrait by van Dyck, that bears the inscription ‘Helena Leonora de Sieveri’, the wife of the painter and art dealer Hendrick Dubois. A copy of the lost original of Helena by van Dyck, now in the Art Institute of Chicago, shows that while there is a fleeting resemblance to the sitter in the present portrait, this identification is misleading.
We are grateful to Professors Katlijne Van der Stighelen, Hans Vlieghe and Christopher Brown for independently confirming the attribution to van Dyck after inspection of the original and for dating the work between 1628-30.