Anthony Van Dyck

CHOICE

Captivating and dynamic...overall a pleasant experience.

Literary Review

Courageous...a robust celebration of a great painter.
— Jonathan Keates

London Review of Books

Blake is truly illuminating.
— Peter Campbell

London Times

Provocative and enjoyable while bringing the period convincingly to life.
— Andrew Wilton

New York Times

A heroic job...comprehensive and fascinating.
— Kristina Cordero

New York Times Book Review

A heroic job...comprehensive and fascinating.
— Kristina Cordero

The New York Times

A heroic job...comprehensive and fascinating.
— Kristina Cordero

Andrew Wilton

Provocative and enjoyable while bringing the period convincingly to life.
— The London Times

Choice

Captivating and dynamic...overall a pleasant experience.

Jonathan Keates

Courageous...a robust celebration of a great painter.
— Literary Review

Kristina Cordero

A heroic job...comprehensive and fascinating.
— New York Times Book

Peter Campbell

Blake is truly illuminating.
— London Review of Books

Times Literary Supplement

A lively biography...a highly personal account, which makes up for the sparseness of the written record...well told.

Publishers Weekly

Famous for his so-called "swagger portraits" of 17th-century European noblemen, Van Dyck (1599-1641) is most often seen as a courtier interested only in flattering the rich and famous of the baroque era. For the artist's quadricentennial last year, British author Blake (Mind Over Medicine; Fat Man's Shadow) produced this more sympathetic life of the painter, now published in the U.S., recasting the relatively few facts that are known about the painter's life. The book is divided into three sections based on the artist's first name as it changed with his locale: early years in Antwerp as Antoon; apprentice years in Italy as Antonio; and finally England, where Van Dyck became Sir Anthony, a commercial and artistic success painting the Stuarts. Blake is not an art historian, and his book often goes out on speculative limbs, particularly in positing romantic relationships for Van Dyck with models, for which definitive documentation does not exist. He relies heavily on secondary sources, but chooses them well, making for a lively if sometimes overly romantic narrative of the artist among the fabulously wealthy and powerful, reaching a sad climax when Van Dyck dies (of what remains unknown) just as his young wife gives birth to their first child. The bibliography helpfully lists ISBNs whenever possible, and includes the address of Blake's personal Web site devoted to Van Dyck (www.vandyck.co.uk) as well as those of numerous sites where photos of the artist's work may be seen. Scholars, however, would be better served by Christopher Brown's less excitable study. 3 inserts of b&w reproductions. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

While there is no dearth of scholarly literature about the great Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck, there has been no recent attempt at a comprehensive English-language accounting of his life and art. Unfortunately, the need for an accessible and up-to-date synthesis has not been satisfied by Blake's mostly wrongheaded opus. Relying on a tenuous foundation of questionable psychological theorizing and little historical evidence, the author invents Van Dyck as a psychically wounded, mother-grieving, father-conflicted, sexually and religiously repressed genius. Having manufactured the artistic personality he requires, the novelist-author (e.g., Fat Man's Shadow) not unsurprisingly finds these personal qualities manifested within a significant portion of the artist's oeuvre. The poverty of the formal articulation of the works themselves, the inadequate appreciation of the crosscurrents of contemporary art and taste, the tendency to enlard with trivia, and the grossly inadequate illustrations all combine to make this an unessential work.--Robert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, New York Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Cordero

[A] comprehensive and fascinating biography... Though celebrated in his day, Van Dyck left behind a surprisingly skimpy paper trail, and Blake has done a heroic job of piecing together the extant bits and applying his own keen insight into possible historical and psychological factors at play.
—The New York Times Book Review