From Publishers Weekly
Famous for his so-called "swagger portraits" of 17th-century European noblemen, Van Dyck (1599-1641) is most often seen as a courtier interested only in flattering the rich and famous of the baroque era. For the artist's quadricentennial last year, British author Blake (Mind Over Medicine; Fat Man's Shadow) produced this more sympathetic life of the painter, now published in the U.S., recasting the relatively few facts that are known about the painter's life. The book is divided into three sections based on the artist's first name as it changed with his locale: early years in Antwerp as Antoon; apprentice years in Italy as Antonio; and finally England, where Van Dyck became Sir Anthony, a commercial and artistic success painting the Stuarts. Blake is not an art historian, and his book often goes out on speculative limbs, particularly in positing romantic relationships for Van Dyck with models, for which definitive documentation does not exist. He relies heavily on secondary sources, but chooses them well, making for a lively if sometimes overly romantic narrative of the artist among the fabulously wealthy and powerful, reaching a sad climax when Van Dyck dies (of what remains unknown) just as his young wife gives birth to their first child. The bibliography helpfully lists ISBNs whenever possible, and includes the address of Blake's personal Web site devoted to Van Dyck (www.vandyck.co.uk) as well as those of numerous sites where photos of the artist's work may be seen. Scholars, however, would be better served by Christopher Brown's less excitable study. 3 inserts of b&w reproductions. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
While there is no dearth of scholarly literature about the great Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck, there has been no recent attempt at a comprehensive English-language accounting of his life and art. Unfortunately, the need for an accessible and up-to-date synthesis has not been satisfied by Blake's mostly wrongheaded opus. Relying on a tenuous foundation of questionable psychological theorizing and little historical evidence, the author invents Van Dyck as a psychically wounded, mother-grieving, father-conflicted, sexually and religiously repressed genius. Having manufactured the artistic personality he requires, the novelist-author (e.g., Fat Man's Shadow) not unsurprisingly finds these personal qualities manifested within a significant portion of the artist's oeuvre. The poverty of the formal articulation of the works themselves, the inadequate appreciation of the crosscurrents of contemporary art and taste, the tendency to enlard with trivia, and the grossly inadequate illustrations all combine to make this an unessential work.-Robert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, New York Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.