Van Dyck

"Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599-1941): a native of Antwerp, Van Dyck also lived and worked for long periods in Italy and England, where his brief, productive life ended. He is best known for his work at the court of Charles I of England and his images of Charles and his Queens, Henrietta Maria, combine imperial tradition with a lyricism that is unique. The full-length portraits of aristocrats in the Caroline court and in Genoa, Antwerp, Brussels and The Hague set a standard for elegance, grandeur and personal insight that influenced the history of Western portraiture into the twentieth century in the work of John Singer Sargent." "Like Titian, whom he admired and whose artistic legacy he transformed and handed on, Van Dyck was as gifted with religious and mythological subjects as he was with portraits. He pioneered means of expressing personal piety and intimacy that would dominate later-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious art throughout Catholic Europe. In his history paintings he evolved a style which owed much to Titian but also foreshadowed the rococo painters of the eighteenth century." "This catalogue raisonne includes a reproduction of every known authentic painting by the artist, the provenance and the significant facts and literature on each."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.