Van Dyck has exercised more influence in England than abroad. Many of our greatest eighteenth-century portrait painters have largely formed themselves upon his example. Gainsborough was the most conspicuous instance of this. From his earliest days he worshipped the great Fleming, and that the spell never left him may be gauged from his dying words: "We are all going to Heaven, and Van Dyck is of the company." Even prior to his departure for Bath, his portraits possessed many of the qualities of Van Dyck, but after arriving in the western city, then the centre of a rich and fashionable world, he had manifold opportunities of studying his favourite master. His brushwork became at once more refined, his colouring more transparent, and his method in every way more facile. Before leaving Bath he had produced portraits which are worthy to be placed alongside those of Van Dyck, and after a few years' residence in London had created those marvels of the brush which contend for supremacy with the finest works of the Fleming. For example, what portrait of the latter master could be cited to surpass the portrait of Mrs. Graham in the Gallery at Edinburgh, the superb group at Dulwich, or the "Blue Boy," in the possession of the Duke of Westminster?
Reynolds appears to have worked more in emulation of Titian than Van Dyck. He painted in a solider and apparently slower manner, and if the slickness--if I may be allowed an Americanism--of the Flemish master appealed to him, it yet had no visible effect upon his own technique.
The minor masters of our school demonstrate materially how much they owed to Van Dyck. Allan Ramsay and Cotes bear adequate witness of this.
Full justice, however, has not been done to the good wrought for English art by his immediate followers and pupils. It is only of late years that the portraits of old Stone are beginning to be sorted out from those of the later period of Van Dyck. Stone was occupied in copying or making replicas of the portraits of Van Dyck, and so well did he succeed in his task that, even to this day, numerous works by him are to be found in the country houses of England passing under the name of the great master.
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