Titian (c. 1488/90–1576) died in Venice in 1576, twenty-three years before van Dyck was born in Antwerp. The formation that shaped van Dyck’s practice as a portraitist was therefore retrospective. The sketchbook van Dyck kept across his Italian years, now in the British Museum, records the young artist’s obsession with Titian. What he was absorbing a compositional formula, but also a way of understanding what paint could do to the surface of a face: how warmth could be generated from within a picture rather than described on it, how form could accumulate through transparent layers rather than be fixed by line, how the appearance of presence in a portrait is not the same thing as the description of an appearance.
That understanding had a technical consequence.
The Brussels magistrates’ head studies share an unusual ground preparation: a scumbled grey wash applied over a layer of red bole. This is not standard Flemish workshop practice. The red bole beneath the grey creates a warm undertone that is never entirely suppressed by the paint placed above it — inflecting flesh tones, holding the shadows from going cold, allowing the face to glow rather than sit inert on the surface. It is a Venetian solution to the problem of painting a face in a limited palette under time pressure,. The economy of means the ground makes possible is precisely what these rapid life studies required: a single sitting, a restricted palette, and the obligation to capture a man’s particular quality of attention before he left the studio.
References
Alsteens, S. (2016) in Alsteens, S. and Eaker, A. (eds) Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture, exh. cat. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
British Museum (n.d.) Antoon van Dyck. Italian Sketchbook (containing 121 leaves). Available at: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1957-1214-207-84 (Accessed: 30 June 2026).
Sotheby’s (2026) Sir Anthony van Dyck: Head Study of a Man in a Ruff (Portrait of a Magistrate), Lot 334, Old Master Paintings and Works on Paper Day Auction, 2 July 2026. Available at: https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2026/old-master-paintings-works-on-paper-day-auction-l26034/head-study-of-a-man-in-a-ruff-portrait-of-a (Accessed: 30 June 2026).
Roy, A. (1999) ‘The National Gallery Van Dycks: Technique and Development’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin, 20, pp. 50–83. Available at: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/research/research-resources/technical-bulletin/the-national-gallery-van-dycks-technique-and-development (Accessed: 30 June 2026).
Howie, A. (2023) ‘Materializing the Global: Textiles, Color, and Race in a Genoese Portrait by Anthony van Dyck’, Renaissance Quarterly, 76(2), pp. 589–644. Available at: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1017/rqx.2023.203?__cf_chl_f_tk=AEWB_uBOC04clm6pd5zthnAkDne51NWcp7sDwDfOaS4-1782837228-1.0.1.1-TOoVjc3HJs.akpcvxjArUOFk5NnRAg9Y0vB3NrfsJSE(Accessed: 29 June 2026).
White, C. (2021) Anthony van Dyck and the Art of Portraiture. London: Paul Holberton Publishing