Anthony van Dyck, as with Hans Holbein a century earlier, was the foreign-born painter who gave an entire English age its image of itself. It is to Van Dyck (1599-1641) that we owe our visual conception of the Caroline haute monde and, what’s more, so pervasive was his languorous, insouciant and glamorous depiction of mid-17th-century nobility that it became the default mode of society portraits for succeeding centuries. The swagger portraiture he perfected did not, however, work its spell on everyone: the critic Roger Fry, for example, dismissed Van Dyck’s portraits as merely: “the last perfection of furniture for the drawing-rooms of the great”.
Had Fry looked harder and reined in his Bloomsbury snootiness, he would have seen that one of the traits of Van Dyck’s portraits that was so transformative was his use of landscape backgrounds. He freed his subjects from the interiors of their palaces and grand houses and ranged them with the natural world as their backdrop, seductively packaging his clients as masters and mistresses of the world, both inside and out: the woods and parklands were their possessions and natural domain too.
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