Antoon van Dyck (1599–1641), Portrait of Isabella van Waerbeke (?-1660), wife of the painter Paul de Vos (?-1678), c. 1628′, Oil on canvas, 119.7 x 94.2 cm, The Wallace Collection, London
Antoon van Dyck was godfather to Peter Paul de Vos, one of the sons of the Antwerp animal painter Paul de Vos (c.1591–1678) and his wife Isabella van Waerbeke (?–1660), and another of their sons had Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) standing for him at the font, which means that two of the most important painters in northern Europe had personal, domestic ties to the same household in the same city at roughly the same moment. Paul de Vos was himself the brother of the portrait and history painter Cornelis de Vos (c.1584–1651) and the brother-in-law of the animal and still-life painter Frans Snyders (1579–1657), who had married his sister Margaretha, so that the professional world of Antwerp painting in the 1620s and 1630s was not really a professional world at all but a family one, held together by marriages, baptisms, shared studio commissions, and the kind of accumulated trust that comes from people who have known each other since they were young and have been borrowing each other’s brushes ever since.
It is this closeness, rather than any formal commission, that sits behind Van Dyck’s portrait of Isabella, painted around 1628 shortly after his return from Italy, and the painting feels different for it, less performed, less arranged for an audience, more like a record of someone the painter actually knew very well.
That said, the portrait is far from casual. Van Dyck had spent the years between 1621 and 1627 in Italy, primarily in Genoa, and had come back to Antwerp with a transformed sense of what a portrait could do with space, colour, and restraint. The influence of Titian (c.1488–1576) is visible here in the discipline of the palette, the blacks and whites and carefully modulated flesh tones, and in the decision to let the figure sit in an uncluttered composition rather than loading the canvas with attributes and props in the manner that Flemish burgher portraiture often favoured. The result is a painting that feels both warmer and more serious than much of what was being produced in Antwerp at the time, and it raises a question that applies to a good deal of Van Dyck’s work from this period: how much of that apparent ease belongs to the sitter, and how much is something the painter has learned to produce?
Isabella’s expression is difficult to pin down, which is part of what makes the portrait interesting. The head tilts slightly, the gaze meets the viewer without anxiety, and the mouth settles into something that is neither welcoming nor closed off. Van Dyck paints her in the plain black dress and broad white collar of a prosperous Antwerp household, not a noblewoman’s costume, and he makes no effort to push her social standing higher than it was. What he does instead is paint her hands with extraordinary care, pale and slender and placed so that the eye travels naturally downward from the face, and in doing so he gives the portrait a second centre of gravity. Van Dyck’s hands are always worth special attention. They tend to do the work that the face will not, carrying the social information, the claim to refinement, the suggestion of character, that a composed expression holds back, and here they are poised with a calm precision that tells you more about how Isabella wished to be seen than her expression ever could.
The portrait was originally a pendant. Its companion, showing Paul de Vos, is recorded as having been destroyed in the fire at Laeken Palace in 1890, and the loss changes what we have. Pendant portraits were conceived as a pair, and what survives is always only half the conversation. Isabella looks out at us now as a solitary figure, but the painting was built to be read alongside another canvas that answered it, and that absence is part of its present condition whether we acknowledge it or not.
References
Barnes, S.J., De Poorter, N., Millar, O. and Vey, H. (2004) Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings. New Haven: Yale University Press
Wheelock, A.K., Barnes, S.J. and Held, J.S. (1990) Anthony van Dyck. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of Isabella van Waerbeke (?–1660), wife of Pauwels de Vos (?–1678), c.1628. RKDimages, image no. 122734. Available at: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/122734 (Accessed: 6 August 2024.
The Wallace Collection (n.d.) Portrait of Isabella Waerbeke, P16. Wallace Collection Online. Available at: https://wallacelive.wallacecollection.org/eMP/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&objectId=64906&viewType=detailView (Accessed: 6 August 2024).