After Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of the Artist

An attractive young man looks out at the viewer with a piercing gaze and provocative expression. With an elegant hand gesture he points towards his chest, alluding to the fact this image is in fact a self portrait. His lips are parted, as if to speak and introduce himself – this is the Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck.

Van Dyck worked in the Antwerp studio of the leading Flemish painter Rubens before finding success as an independent artist in his late teens. With his cultured sophistication, self-confidence and love of fashion, Van Dyck fitted in effortlessly within courtly circles. He swiftly rose to fame working for prestigious patrons across Europe, including Charles I, King of England, and his court in London. He travelled a lot in the course of his career, and spent long periods of time settled in England and Italy. He died in his house at Blackfriars in London.

The National Gallery’s picture is a reduced, late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century copy of Van Dyck’s half-length original, which is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This is one of three self portraits Van Dyck painted in the years around 1620, when he would have been about 20 years old and acutely conscious of his new-found fame across Europe (the other two are in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, and Alte Pinakothek, Munich). The facial likeness in all three appears to have been based on a now-lost head study that was made from life (or rather, in the case of a self portrait, from a reflection in a mirror). Opinions differ over the exact dated sequence of the three pictures, but it is generally accepted that the New York painting was made before the Munich version, and before Van Dyck travelled to Italy, either while he was in Antwerp or, most likely, during his first visit to London in the winter of 1620–1.