This painstakingly thorough examination of van Dyck's extensive use of prints--including etchings, engravings, and aquatints--is the companion catalog to an exhibition in Antwerp celebrating the artist's birth 400 years ago, in 1699. Though he is best known for his paintings, van Dyck's prints influenced artists well into the 18th century and have always been prized by collectors and students of the history of printmaking. The book's introduction expresses the authors' hopes that it will prove accessible to the ordinary reader--and there are many sections that are fascinating. The descriptions of the 17th-century practice of ordering copper plates--which when delivered still bore hammer marks from the metalsmith who had created them, so that before beginning an etching the artist (or more likely his apprentices) had to make the surface flat--are just one example. Another is a description of the printmaking processes of the time that points out the "clots and pumples" on a plate that has been heated too rapidly, as a contemporary translator described the little bumps that appear in such well-known images as Rembrandt's Deposition, with its speckled ground. There is also a stunning array of images in various states, including preparatory drawings, proofs, corrected proofs, final prints, later engravings, and similar types of prints created in other ateliers of the time.

Van Dyck acquainted himself with printmaking in Rubens's workshop, and that artist's flair is evident throughout van Dyck's fluid, flashy, finely observed portraits. Van Dyck was not Rubens, however, or Rembrandt--both of whom employed printmaking as simply another medium to bend to their incomparable vision. His prints seem to have been executed mainly as advertisements, but the artist is so accomplished that it is surprising how little his work is discussed today. This scholarly, carefully produced book is filled with large color plates, and its type is set, blessedly, in such a way as to make its brilliantly detailed text highly legible, unlike many tomes of this type. With the exception of the slightly confusing captions, which often omit dates, it is a book that will go far in correcting contemporary neglect of this important artist. --Peggy Moorman


Book Description
Like Dürer, Rembrandt and Goya, Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) made a key contribution to the art of printmaking. He was himself a talented etcher, and prints after his paintings were cut by the best engravers of his day. Yet, to date, his printmaking has suffered from undeserved neglect. This book discusses Van Dyck's first acquaintance with the medium in Rubens's workshop and illuminates the genesis of the Iconography, a portrait gallery of illustrious contemporaries. All his etchings are catalogued together with preparatory drawings and grisailles, as well as proofs containing corrective flourishes. Furthermore the book includes a selection of the prints after paintings by Van Dyck. A number of them were the initiative of the artist himself, and others were produced on behalf of publishers and engravers. Works from the eighteenth century are included to illustrate the influence Van Dyck exerted until long after his death-- even in France and England.

The introductory essays discuss the collecting of Van Dyck prints, the phenomenon of the trial proof, and technical aspects of the etchings. Based on new archival research the biographies are included of all those who were instrumental in the production of the prints: engravers, publishers, and the persons to whom they were dedicated by Van Dyck.

Many of the prints are reproduced in color and the book has numerous comparative illustrations making it essential not only for scholars and enthusiasts of Van Dyck's work, but all those interested in the history of printmaking.



About the Author
Carl Depauw, exhibitions curator Antwerpen Open and curator at the Museum Plantin-Moretus/Stedelijk Prentenkabinet, Antwerp, has been responsible for various exhibitions on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century prints and drawings, and has published on graphic artists from that period.

Ger Luijten, chief curator of prints at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, was one of the organisers of the exhibition Dawn of the Golden Age (1993-94) and published, with Eddy de Jongh, Mirror of everyday life: Genre prints in the Netherlands 1550-1700 (1997).

FROM THE PUBLISHER