He further retained the services of Van Dyck as his assistant, which he would not have done had any jealousy existed between them. It was probably the pressure of commissions, which flowed in upon him in innumerable quantities, that induced him to take this step. It was quite impossible for the master himself to accomplish all the work he undertook. Outside Italy he was the first master to employ his school as a sort of manufactory on a large scale. So well did he train his assistants that he had only to make the sketch himself, and to superintend its painting, for a large work to be turned out in an incredibly short time. As Van Dyck was his most capable assistant, he would certainly employ him upon the important parts, and as it has already been pointed out that it is difficult to differentiate between the works of the two men at this time, it would be still more difficult to decide definitely what hand Van Dyck had in the large number of religious and historical pictures that were being sent out under Rubens' name at this time.
During this period, however, Van Dyck had acquired a reputation of his own. He had been elected a master of the Antwerp Corporation of painters in 1618, that is, whilst still in his twentieth year.
It was the habit of most Northern artists at that time to make a journey in Italy. The renown of the works created during the preceding two centuries by the Italian Renaissance had spread all over Europe, and no young artist considered his education complete without having spent a few years in studying them. Moreover, they found that patrons patronised them better if they had been through this Italian training. These ideas were rather dictated by the prevailing fashion than by any solid good to be derived by the artist who underwent it. We have innumerable examples of Dutchmen and Flemings whose natural genius became perverted upon Italian soil. Nicholas Berchem and Karl Dujardin were striking examples of the sad results which frequently accrued from thus transplanting themselves into a country with which their temperament had nothing in common. It is probable that had Karl Dujardin remained in Holland, the world would have been enriched by a landscape painter of the first order, for he had gifts far above even the average painter of his time. But immediately on reaching Italy he succumbed to the influences surrounding him, and endeavoured to get rid as far as possible of his early training, and to see things and render them in the Italian way. The result was, that whilst he never threw off the Dutch character of his scenes and figures, he enveloped them with a conventional atmosphere as monotonous as it is untrue.