| Anthony Van Dyck and "The Iconography": The great age of portrait engraving took place in the early and mid seventeenth century. In France such remarkable portrait engravers as Robert Nanteuil and Antoine Masson achieved fame at least equal to the most highly regarded painters. In Belgium and Holland the division between painter and engraver/etcher was much less distinct. Rembrandt was as great an etcher as a painter and both Rubens and Van Dyck conducted a school of engravers under their close personal supervision. In the 1620's Peter Paul Rubens founded an engraver's school in Antwerp in order to render his paintings and drawings into copper. Such great engravers as Lucas Vorsterman (1595-1675), Boetius a Bolswert (1580-1633) and Paulus Pontius (1603-1658) formed the cornerstone of what was soon known as the 'School of Rubens'.
At the age of nineteen Anthony Van Dyck (Antwerp, 1599-1641) was admitted into the painter's Guild of Antwerp, as a Master. A year later he became the senior assistant to Rubens. A superb portraitist, Van Dyck became famous throughout Europe and later was appointed court painter to King James the First of England.
Van Dyck was first introduced to both engraving and etching by Peter Paul Rubens. Around 1630 he began his most ambitious printmaking project to create a uniform series of engravings of famous contemporaries derived from his portraits. Van Dyck provided his engravers with extensive preparatory work, including drawings and oil sketches. He then corrected his engraver's proofs and even etched the outline features on some of the portraits. In the following years he designed and supervised about eighty such portrait engravings which were published individually by Martin van den Enden. His principal engravers included Paulus Pontius, Nicolaes Lauwers, Pieter de Jode, Lucas Vorsterman, Robert van Voerst and others. These wonderfully graceful portrait engravings were a high point of Baroque art and proved to be perhaps the most influential group of portraits in the history of printmaking. |
