Van Dyck's contradictory elements. He was actuated by opposite motives which are hard to analyze, and which in their instability have within themselves, whatever their outward advantages, the doom of failure in the highest excellence. He was a proud man, dissatisfied both with himself and his calling, resenting, with less reason than Hans Holbein showed, that he should be condemned to portrait painting, yet by no means undervaluing or slurring over his work. He 'would detain the persons who sat to him to dinner for an opportunity of studying their countenances and re-touching their pictures,' 'would have a sitter, sitting to him seven entire days, mornings and evenings, and would not once let the man see the picture till it pleased the painter.' Van Dyck appears to have been a man with the possibilities in him of greater things than he attained, possibilities which were baffled by his weakness and self-indulgence, leaving him with such a sense of this as spoiled his greatest successes.
I have the varying indications of two pictures of Van Dyck from which to get an impression of his personal appearance. The first picture is that of a youthful face, soft, smiling, with dark eyes, finely-formed nose, a slightly open mouth, having a full-cleft under lip, the hair profuse and slightly curled, but short, and no beard or moustache. The dress is an open doublet, without a collar, a lace cravat, and one arm half bare. The second is the picture of Van Dyck in the Louvre, which is judged the best likeness of the painter. In this his person is slender, his complexion fair, his eyes grey, his hair chestnut brown, his beard and whiskers red. He wears a vest of green velvet, with a plain collar.
In his art, Van Dyck, with something of the glow of Rubens, and with a delicacy peculiarly his own, was decidedly inferior to his great master, both in power and in fertility of genius. In the superficial refinement which was so essential a part of Van Dyck, he had the capacity of conferring on his sitters a reflection of his own outward stateliness and grace. When he painted at his best his portraits were solid, true, and masterly, but he has been reproached with sacrificing truth to the refining process which he practised. Even in the case of Charles I., whose portraits are our most familiar examples of Van Dyck, and who thus lives in the imagination of most people as the very personification of a noble and handsome cavalier, there have not been wanting critics who have maintained that Charles,--the son of a plain uncouth father, and of a mother rather floridly buxom than delicately handsome, and who was in his childhood a sickly rickety child,--was by no means so well endowed in the matter of manly beauty as we have supposed. These students of old gossip and close investigation, have alleged that Charles was long and lanky, after he had ceased to be Baby Charles; that his nose was too large, and, alas! apt to redden; that his eyes were vacillating; and his mouth, the loosely hung mouth of a man who begins by being irresolute, and ends by being obstinate.[45] Again, in the hands of a sitter, which Van Dyck was supposed to paint with special care and elegance, it has been argued that he copied always the same hand, probably his own, in ignorance, or in defiance of the fact that hands have nearly as much and as varying character as a painter can discover in faces. Though Van Dyck painted many beautiful women, he did not excel in rendering them beautiful on canvas, so that succeeding generations, in gazing on Van Dyck's versions of Venitia, Lady Digby, and Dorothy Sydney--Waller's Sacharissa,--have wondered how Sir Kenelm, Waller, and their contemporaries, could find these ladies so beautiful.