"Van Dyck heightens the statures that Rubens made too stout; he indicates less muscle, less relief, fewer bones, and not so much blood. He is less turbulent, never brutal; his expressions are less gross; he laughs but little, has often a vein of tenderness, but he knows not the strong sob of violent men. He never startles; he often corrects the roughness of his master; he is easy because his talent is prodigiously natural and facile; he is free and alert, but he is never carried away. . . . .

In every case he has more than his master, a feeling for draperies well put on, for fashion; he has a taste for silky stuffs, for satins, for ribbons, for points, for plumes and ornamental swords."

In that sketch little more than a bare mention of Van Dyck's name placed before us the favorite pupil of the great Rubens, and, next after the master himself, the greatest painter of Flanders. There are men so great that to stand next below them on the honor-roll of the world is high praise. Such a man was Rubens, and in placing Antony van Dyck only a degree below him, we bestow an honor which nothing but genius of a lofty sort could merit.

Van Dyck was in one sense a reflection of his master but in no wise was he that merely as an imitator. He added to Rubens' characteristics his own individual qualities, most prominent among which were grace and refinement. Thus he was a worthy bearer of the torch of progress—he showed himself a grateful heir of the ages by contributing his own part to the sum total of artistic production.

Let us see how true this was: Rubens was wild and fleshly at times, seeming too much to abound in animal life. Van Dyck, in his pictures, subdued this wildness, adding in its stead a certain grace and elegance. Rubens occasionally crowded his canvas to overflowing so that we are confused by the very exuberance of his work. Van Dyck, with calmer judgment, used fewer figures and thus cleared up our confused notions. Rubens, full of allegorical and historical conceptions, found portraiture too tame for his teeming brush. Van Dyck, working more minutely, felt the universe of conflict going on in one man or woman's soul and so exquisitely wrought his portraits that, though they stand before us polished men and women of the world, yet we feel that there is within them a hidden life of which Van Dyck's art gives us sure but delicate suggestions.

Here, at least, was one branch of the painter's art in which the pupil out-stripped his master. Without Rubens we can scarcely imagine Van Dyck to have existed as a painter. They stand as suggestion and complement to each other, each one greater because the other lived.

If we are interested in Van Dyck as the inheritor from Rubens, we cannot be less interested in him as the forerunner of the English school of painting so ably represented by Reynolds, Gainsborough and Lawrence. He was the last great foreign painter brought into England by the art-munificence of her sovereigns. After his death there came from foreign lands a race of petty painters and then Englishmen awoke, in their appreciation of Hogarth and Reynolds, to the consciousness that within their own borders were men, the products of whose brushes placed them among really great painters.

So Van Dyck, born in Belgium, the intellectual heir of Rubens, died in England the intellectual progenitor of Reynolds and Gainsborough. By a stretch of fancy, there is a significance in the fact that the dust of Van Dyck has long ago mingled with English soil. In the same manner his artistic genius which is a thing of spirit and so knows no disintegration, has through all the years since his death diffused itself through English art and made it stronger and more redolent of the soil whereon it thrives.

Van Dyck's life, like that of Masaccio and Raphael, was a short one and yet so complete and rounded in the perfection of the work he accomplished that we dare not imagine additional honors had his years been prolonged to the scriptural "three score and ten." The materials from which to draw the incidents of Van Dyck's life, especially the earlier part, are scarce and even those we have are quite uncertain. Ben Jonson once wrote of Shakespeare, referring perhaps to the paucity of biographical matter, "Reader, look not on the man but on his books." Imitating Jonson's words, we might likewise say of Van Dyck, "Student, look not on the man but on his pictures."

Antony Van Dyck was born of well-to-do parents in Antwerp, March 22, 1599. His father was a manufacturer of silk and woolen stuffs as had been his ancestors for several generations. It would please our fancy better to believe an old legend which gave the occupation of Antony's father as that of a painter of glass for rich cathedral windows. Such work for the father of a great painter is quite to our liking and so, for generations, men willingly accepted the old story as truth. If, however, this romantic occupation of the father must be thrust aside for the more prosaic one of silk and woolen manufacturer we are certain of quite as picturesque employment for the dainty fingers of the child's lady mother.

Although Antony was the seventh of her twelve children she found time to do very beautiful work with her needle and brilliant silken floss. She invented her patterns and shaded her work so skilfully that she created pictures instead of bits of fantastic embroidery. We can imagine how she taught the silken vine, ladened with glossy leaves and flowers, to climb the wrought trellis, or how she worked with nimble fingers some legend of love or daring to adorn her home.

We know that shortly before the little Antony was born, she worked in all its details the story of Susannah and the Elders. It was surely a womanly employment pervaded with true art feeling, and Van Dyck's mother, engaging in it, unconsciously put herself beside some lovely dames of fact and fiction—beside Matilda, William the Conqueror's prudent consort, who with her gentlewomen wrought out in the Bayeux tapestry the events which her warlike husband was bringing to pass; beside Penelope who wove those mystic scenes by day and ravelled them by night to foil her unlawful suitors; beside the thousands of dainty women, who, in our more tranquil times, seize bird and flower and grass from field and wood and hold them in all the radiance of their native color to adorn our happy indoor life.

Little is known of the first years of the painter, but we can easily imagine that his were fingers that early found delight in drawing the crude images of a child-artist. We can fancy that often and often as his mother shaped with needle and floss the tree or flower of her thought the child at her knee followed her pattern with the wayward pencil clutched in his baby hand. Whatever may be the truth or falsity of our impressions along this line, we know that at the age of ten his father thought it worth while to send the boy to study drawing and painting in the studio of Van Balen, a pupil of the famous Van Noort, who had instructed Rubens at one time.

Two years before, the gentle mother had died leaving her little artist son to be cared for by others.

In Van Balen's studio the young Antony soon excelled all his associates. After he had been here for five years Rubens returned from Italy and all eyes were turned to him, loaded as he was with his young and growing fame. Among the throng of artists who sought the distinction of being instructed by Rubens was Van Dyck, then a lad of fifteen or sixteen. His industry and skill with Van Balen was well known, so he quite easily obtained the permission he wished. He had been with the great master but a short time when it was quite evident that of all the crowd of artists who worked with him, the young Van Dyck was the favorite—the one selected to assist the master in his most precious work.

With his usual keenness, Rubens noted Van Dyck's power in portraiture and advised the young man to develop that branch of painting and to perfect himself in it by an extended tour of Italy. There have been those who have asserted that Rubens feared that Van Dyck would prove a dangerous rival and so he encouraged him to pursue the line of work least likely to menace his own. If we study Rubens' character deeply we shall be convinced that such a motive was far below the temper of his lofty soul. Further, we must be sure, from the way Van Dyck's art developed, that Rubens had no thought but for the welfare of his student and friend, for, beautiful as are the many other pictures by Van Dyck, in portraiture he stands close to Titian, the greatest portrait painter among the Old Masters.