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Indepth Arts News:
"The Light of Nature: Van Dyck"
1999-10-10 until 2000-11-28
The British Museum
London, ,
UK United Kingdom
The twenty-nine known landscape
drawings by Anthony van Dyck
(1599-1641) include some of the
most beautiful sketches from nature
to survive from the 17th century.
Ranging from views of towns and
woodland to studies of flowers, they
are imbued with a distinct
atmosphere and drawn with
astonishing freshness and delicacy.
Van Dyck made many of them in
England - four depict Rye in Sussex
- when he was working for King
Charles I, and his occasional use of
watercolour marks the beginning of
the great British tradition in this
medium. As a group his drawings
are an unusual survival from the
hand of a painter who was not a
specialist in landscape painting; yet
in quality they are comparable to
drawings by the most distinguished
landscapists of his time.
The exhibition brings together 25 of
the 29 known landscape drawings
by Van Dyck. Now widely
dispersed, they are borrowed from
some 20 collections all over Europe
and the United States. They have
never before been examined other
than as an adjunct to his work as a
portrait and history painter. By
displaying them alongside
comparable landscape drawings by
Van Dyck's exact contemporaries
from Italy, France and the
Netherlands as well as his native
Flanders, the exhibition
demonstrates their exceptional
quality. Some of the finest
landscape drawings by Poussin,
Claude, and Rembrandt, as well as
drawings by Domenichino,
Guercino, Jan van Goyen, Hollar
and many others, will be exhibited
and compared with Van Dyck's
work. The growth in the number of
sketches from nature that survive
from the 1620s and 1630s
compared with earlier periods will
be explored, and for the first time
Van Dyck's landscape drawings will
be seen in this European-wide
context of landscape art.
Van Dyck was born exactly 400 years ago. He was among the most
prodigiously gifted artists of the seventeenth or indeed any century. A child
prodigy, his drawings seem like effortless productions (bringing Mozart to mind),
and have been undervalued because of the importance of his oil paintings. Most
of his landscapes were sketched out of doors, directly from nature, and they
exhibit considerable freedom and spontaneity. It will be seen that in the 1630s,
he already produced drawings of the type developed by Rembrandt in around
1650. The latter's small masterpiece, the Landscape with a Sailing Boat, is
being lent from the J. Paul Getty Museum. Claude Lorrain's View with Trees on
a Ridge from the British Museum's own collection, and Nicolas Poussin's
Landscape in the Campagna from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, as well
as three drawings from the Royal Collection, lent by Her Majesty The Queen,
will be among the exhibition's highlights. But above all the Van Dycks themselves
will be a revelation. Three drawings are being attributed to him for the first time
in more than a century, including the large Study of a fallen Tree from the
Louvre. Formerly given to Van Dyck's master, Rubens, these three drawings will
lead to a reassessment of the relationship between the two artists, revealing that
Van Dyck was sometimes given considerable independence when acting as
Rubens' assistant.
The sixty drawings in the exhibition are illustrated in colour in a catalogue written
by the exhibition curator Martin Royalton Kisch, to accompany the show which
is available now from Museum shops price £ 20. The catalogue also completely
re-evaluates the history of sketching directly from nature.
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