Sir Anthony van Dyck was born in March 22, 1599 and died December 9, 1641. He was a Flemish Baroque artist who became the leading court painter in England. He is most famous for his portraits of King Charles I of England and Scotland and 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 water color and etching.

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Anthony vanDyke Self Portrait and a Sunflower show the gold collar and chain given to him by Charles I in 1633. The sunflower may represent a royal patronage.

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Genoan hauteur from the Lomelli Family, painted in 1623. For the Genoese aristocracy, then in a final flush of prosperity, he developed a full-length portrait style, drawing on Veronese and Titian as well as Ruben's style from his own period in Genoa, where extremely tall but graceful figures look down on the viewer with great hauteur.

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King Charles I, painted around 1635 is on loan from the Louvre, Paris. King Charles I was the most passionate and generous collector of art among the British monarchs, and saw art as a way of promoting his grandiose view of the monarchy. Altogether van Dyck has been estimated to have painted forty portraits of King Charles himself, as well as about thirty of the Queen, nine of Earl of Strafford and multiple ones of other courtiers.

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Samson and Delilah, painted around 1630 is a strenuous history painting in the manner of Rubens, and the saturated use of color reveals van Dyck?s study of Titian.

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Henrietta Maria and the dwarf, Sir Jeffrey Hudson was painted in 1633. Van Dyck's portraits certainly flattered more than Velasquez's; when Sophia, later Electoress of Hanover, first met Queen Henrietta Maria, in exile in Holland in 1641, she wrote: "Van Dyck's handsome portraits had given me so fine an idea of the beauty of all English ladies, that I was surprised to find that the Queen, who looked so fine in painting, was a small woman raised up on her chair, with long skinny arms and teeth like defence works projecting from her mouth..."


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