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डॉ.लाल रत्नाकर

के साथ.

REMBRANDT Harmenszoon van Rijn

(b. 1606, Leiden, d. 1669, Amsterdam)

by-Dr.Lal Ratnakar

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Biography

Rembrandt was born in Leiden on July 15, 1606- his full name Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. He was the son of a miller. Despite the fact that he came from a family of relatively modest means, his parents took great care with his education. Rembrandt began his studies at the Latin School, and at the age of 14 he was enrolled at the University of Leiden. The program did not interest him, and he soon left to study art - first with a local master, Jacob van Swanenburch, and then, in Amsterdam, with Pieter Lastman, known for his historical paintings. After six months, having mastered everything he had been taught, Rembrandt returned to Leiden, where he was soon so highly regarded that although barely 22 years old, he took his first pupils. One of his students was the famous artist Gerrit Dou.

Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam in 1631; his marriage in 1634 to Saskia van Uylenburgh, the cousin of a successful art dealer, enhanced his career, bringing him in contact with wealthy patrons who eagerly commissioned portraits. An exceptionally fine example from this period is the Portrait of Nicolaes Ruts (1631, Frick Collection, New York City). In addition, Rembrandt's mythological and religious works were much in demand, and he painted numerous dramatic masterpieces such as The Blinding of Samson (1636, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt). Because of his renown as a teacher, his studio was filled with pupils, some of whom (such as Carel Fabritius) were already trained artists. In the 20th century, scholars have reattributed a number of his paintings to his associates; attributing and identifying Rembrandt's works is an active area of art scholarship.

In contrast to his successful public career, however, Rembrandt's family life was marked by misfortune. Between 1635 and 1641 Saskia gave birth to four children, but only the last, Titus, survived; her own death came in 1642- at the age of 30. Hendrickje Stoffels, engaged as his housekeeper about 1649, eventually became his common-law wife and was the model for many of his pictures. Despite Rembrandt's financial success as an artist, teacher, and art dealer, his penchant for ostentatious living forced him to declare bankruptcy in 1656. An inventory of his collection of art and antiquities, taken before an auction to pay his debts, showed the breadth of Rembrandt's interests: ancient sculpture, Flemish and Italian Renaissance paintings, Far Eastern art, contemporary Dutch works, weapons, and armor. Unfortunately, the results of the auction - including the sale of his house - were disappointing.

These problems in no way affected Rembrandt's work; if anything, his artistry increased. Some of the great paintings from this period are The Jewish Bride (1665), The Syndics of the Cloth Guild (1661, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), Bathsheba (1654, Louvre, Paris), Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph (1656, Staatliche Gemäldegalerie, Kassel, Germany), and a self-portrait (1658, Frick Collection). His personal life, however, continued to be marred by sorrow. His beloved Hendrickje died in 1663, and his son, Titus, in 1668- only 27 years of age. Eleven months later, on October 4, 1669, Rembrandt died in Amsterdam.

SENIORITY LIST AS ON 01-07-2011-DRAWING & PAINTING

SENIORITY LIST AS ON 01-07-2011

DRAWING & PAINTING

SL. Name of the teachers Dateof Name of the Deg. Seni.

No. Birth College PG/D Yr.Mon

1. Dr.(Smt.) Asha Anand     18-01-50  INCMRT     PG      38-09
2. Dr.(Smt.) Deep Shikha 06-12-53 NAS MRT PG 34-09
3. Dr.Ram Sabda Singh 01-07-50 JVJ SRE PG 33-08
4. Dr. (Smt.) Nisha Sharma 05-01-55 JKP MZN PG 33-06
5. Dr.(Smt.) Meena Kumar 01-01-55 DJC BRT D 33-04
( Subject to the decision of the Supreme Court)
6. Sh. Subodh Misra 20-08-50 SDC MZN D 31-05
7. Dr. Neelima Gupta 12-12-58 INC MRT PG 30-06
8. Dr.(Km.) Madhu Jain 30-04-60 MLJ SRE PG (SF) 28-06
9. Dr.(Smt.) Usha Kiran 07-09-57 MTC MRT PG 27-10
10. Dr. Nupur Sharma 16-12-57 NAS MRT PG 24-03
11. Dr. Akhilesh Sharma 05-06-58 NAS MRT PG 23-08
12. Smt. Geeta Rana 21-10-65 DJC BRT D 23-04
13. Mrs. Alka Tiwari 30-06-63 GDG MDN D 21-04
14. Dr. (Mrs.) Neetu Vashisth 26-12-69 KKJ KTL D 20-04
15. Dr. Nisha Gupta 04-01-61 JKP MZN PG 19-00
16. Dr.Kiran Pradeep Kaushik 14-06-65 KLM MRT PG 19-00
17. Dr. Lal Ratnakar 12-08-57 MMH GZB PG 18-09
18. Dr. Jyotsna 30-08-65 KLM MRT PG 14-03
19. Sh.Ved Pal Singh 07-06-68 DAV MZN PG (SF) 11-06
20. Dr. Hemant Kumar Rai 08-06-61 MMH GZB PG 11-05
21. Dr. Mahesh Kumar 12-08-74 JVJ SRE PG 10-01
22. Mrs. Anju Chaudhary 13-08-72 JAV BRT D 09-10
23. Dr. Archana Rani 30-11-72 RGC MRT PG 09-10
24. Sh. Amrit Lal 02-03-72 MTC MRT PG 09-09
25. Dr. (Km.) Alka Chadha 02-05-73 RGC MRT PG 09-09
26. Dr. (Smt.) Vandana Verma 01-07-76 JKP MZN PG 09-09
27. Sh. Basant Kumar 19-06-71 SDC MZN D 09-03
28. Rishika Pandey 11-04-76 GDG MDN D 09-00
29. Dr. Madhu Vajpai 05-04-57 MTC MRT PG 08-11

El Greco

GRECO, El

Spanish painter of Greek origin (b. 1541, Candia, d. 1614, Toledo)

by-Dr.Lal Ratnakar

Biography

Cretan-born painter, sculptor, and architect who settled in Spain and is regarded as the first great genius of the Spanish School. He was known as El Greco (the Greek), but his real name was Domenikos Theotokopoulos; and it was thus that he signed his paintings throughout his life, always in Greek characters, and sometimes followed by Kres (Cretan).

Little is known of his youth, and only a few works survive by him in the Byzantine tradition of icon painting, notably the Dormition of the Virgin discovered in 1983 (Church of the Koimesis tis Theotokou, Syros). In 1566 he is referred to in a Cretan document as a master painter; soon afterwards he went to Venice (Crete was then a Venetian possession), then in 1570 moved to Rome. The miniaturist Giulio Clovio, whom he met there, described him as a pupil of Titian, but of all the Venetian painters Tintoretto influenced him most (e.g. Christ Healing the Blind, c. 1570), and Michelangelo's impact on his development was also important (e.g. Pietà, c. 1572, Philadelphia Museum of Art).

Among the surviving works of his Italian period are two paintings of the Purification of the Temple (Minneapolis Institute of Arts), a much-repeated theme, and the portrait of Giulio Clovio (Museo di Capodimonte. Naples). By 1577 he was at Toledo, where he remained until his death, and it was there that he matured his characteristic style in which figures elongated into flame-like forms and usually painted in cold, eerie, bluish colours express intense religious feeling. The commission that took him to Toledo — the high altarpiece of the church of S. Domingo el Antiguo - was gained through Diego de Castilla, Dean of Canons at Toledo Cathedral, whom El Greco had met in Rome. The central part of the altarpiece, a 4-m. high canvas of The Assumption of the Virgin (Art Institute of Chicago, 1577), was easily his biggest work to date, but he carried off the dynamic composition triumphantly. A succession of great altarpieces followed throughout his career, the two most famous being El Espolio (Christ Stripped of His Garments) (Toledo Cathedral, 1577-79) and The Burial of Count Orgaz (S. Tome, Toledo. 1586-88). These two mighty works convey the awesomeness of great spiritual events with a sense of mystic rapture, and in his late work El Greco went even further in freeing his figures from earth-bound restrictions: The Adoration of the Shepherds (Prado, Madrid, 1612-14), painted for his own tomb, is a prime example.

El Greco excelled also as a portraitist, mainly of ecclesiastics (Felix Paravicino, Boston Museum, 1609) or gentlemen, although one of his most beautiful works is a portrait of a lady (Art Gallery & Museums Kelvingrove, Glasgow, c. 1577-80), traditionally identified as a likeness of Jeronima de las Cuevas, his common-law wife. He also painted two views of Toledo (Metropolitan Museum, New York, and Museo del Greco, Toledo), both late works, and a mythological painting, Laocoön(National Gallery of Art, Washington, c. 1610), that is unique in his oeuvre. The unusual choice of subject is perhaps explained by the local tradition that Toledo had been founded by descendants of the Trojans.

El Greco also designed complete altar compositions, working as architect and sculptor as well as painter, for instance at the Hospital de la Caridad, Illescas (1603). Pacheco, who visited El Greco in 1611, refers to him as a writer on painting, sculpture, and architecture. He had a proud temperament, conceiving of himself as an artist-philosopher rather than a craftsman, and had a lavish lifestyle, although he had little success in securing the royal patronage he desired and seems to have had some financial difficulties near the end of his life.

His workshop turned out a great many replicas of his paintings, but his work was so personal that his influence was slight, his only followers of note being his son Jorge Manuel Theotokopoulos and Luis Tristan. Interest in his art revived at the end of the 19th century and with the development of Expressionism in the 20th century he came into his own. The strangeness of his art has inspired various theories, for example that he was mad or suffered from astigmatism, but his rapturous paintings make complete sense as an expression of the religious fervour of his adopted country.

RUBENS, Pieter Pauwel

by-Dr.Lal Ratnakar

RUBENS, Pieter Pauwel

(b. 1577, Siegen, d. 1640, Antwerpen)

Biography

Flemish painter who was the greatest exponent of Baroque painting's dynamism, vitality, and sensuous exuberance. His work is a fusion of the traditions of Flemish realism with the classical tendencies of the Italian Renaissance. Though his masterpieces include portraits and landscapes, Rubens is perhaps best known for his religious and mythological compositions.

Early life

Although Rubens' father, Jan, was born a Roman Catholic, his name had appeared on a list of Calvinists as early as 1566. This accounted for the Rubens family's exile to Germany, where Peter Paul was born. Jan Rubens became a diplomatic agent and adviser to the Protestant princess Anna of Saxony (d. 1577), second wife of William the Silent, who led the resistance to Spanish rule of the Netherlands. An unfortunate pregnancy revealed the intimate extent of the relationship between this princess of the house of Orange-Nassau and Rubens' father. She obtained clemency from her husband for Jan, but he and his family were placed under house arrest at Siegen, a Nassau stronghold in Westphalia. The Rubens children were grounded in the classics by their exiled father, who was a doctor of both civil and canon law. Jan died in 1587, after he had been allowed to go to the German city of Cologne. Rubens' mother then took her four surviving children to Antwerp, where Jan had been an alderman.

Antwerp training

At the age of 10, Peter Paul was sent with his brother Philip to a Latin school in Antwerp. In 1590, shortage of money and the need to provide a dowry for his sister Blandina forced Rubens' mother to break off his formal education and send him as a page to the Countess of Lalaing. Soon tired of courtly life, Rubens was allowed to become a painter. He was sent first to his kinsman Tobias Verhaecht, a minor painter of Mannerist landscapes. Having quickly learned the rudiments of his profession, he was apprenticed for four years to an abler master, Adam van Noort, and subsequently to Otto van Veen, one of the most distinguished of the Antwerp Romanists, a group of Flemish artists who had gone to Rome to study the art of antiquity and the Italian Renaissance.

Italian period

In May 1600, with two years' seniority as a master in the Antwerp Guild of St Luke, Rubens set out with Deodatus del Monte, his constant traveling companion and first pupil, for the visual and spiritual adventure of Italy. He was offered employment by Vincenzo I Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, which duchy held one of the largest and finest collections outside the Vatican of works by Italian artists. During the eight years that Rubens was to call Vincenzo his lord, he had unmatched opportunities for fulfilling his expressed intention "to study at close quarters the works of the ancient and modern masters. . . ."

Rubens was sent to Rome (1601-02) by the duke to paint copies of pictures and to live under the protection of Cardinal Montalto. There, through Flemish connections, he obtained his first public commission, to paint three altarpieces for the crypt chapel of St Helena in Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. In Rome the Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci and his assistants were at work in the gallery of the Palazzo Farnese. Their bold scale in drawing and working methods decidedly influenced the young Rubens. He assimilated Venetian colour, light, and loose application of paint first through the works of Tintoretto, then through those of Veronese, long before he could penetrate the inward meaning of Titian's art. Rubens' copies, and his reworking of drawings, offer the most complete survey of the achievement of 16^th-century Italian art in a markedly personal revision.

In 1603 he was entrusted with his first diplomatic mission, to take costly presents from Mantua to Philip III and the Spanish court. This mission gave him a first view of the royal collections in Madrid. His resourcefulness and tact in dealing with the temperamental regular Mantuan representative to the Spanish court raised him in the duke's estimation and helped prepare him for future diplomatic missions.

The only major works he executed for Mantua were the three pictures finished in 1605 for the Jesuit Church of SS. Trinità: The Baptism of Christ (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp), The Transfiguration (Fine Arts Museum, Nancy), and The Gonzaga Family in Adoration of the Most Holy Trinity (Ducal Palace, Mantua). In the same year he completed the Circumcision for the high altar of the Jesuit Church of Sant' Ambrogio in Genoa. Portraits of court beauties by Rubens were commissioned by the duke for the Gonzaga Gallery, of which Rubens was curator.

Toward the end of 1605, Rubens obtained leave from the Duke of Mantua to continue his studies in Rome. There he shared a house with his brother Philip, then librarian to Cardinal Ascanio Colonna, a member of one of Rome's most wealthy and powerful families. Daily contact with Philip, a brilliant student of the famed Flemish humanist and classical scholar Justus Lipsius, added zest to his personal discovery of the antique world.

In the summer of 1607 Rubens was asked to accompany the Gonzaga court to the Italian seaside resort of San Pier d'Arena, where he continued to paint with splendour portraits of the Genoese aristocracy. Chronic arrears in payment of his salary, and an ambition to establish himself as an international, rather than just a Mantuan, artist, motivated him to accept other patronage. He received the backing of the wealthy Genoese banker to the papacy, Monsignor Jacopo Serra, who was instrumental in obtaining for him the coveted commission for the painting over the high altar of the Roman Church of Santa Maria in Vallicella. He concurrently painted the altarpiece of the Adoration of the Shepherds for the Oratorian Order in Fermo.

In October 1608 his brother summoned him to their mother's deathbed in Antwerp, but she died before he could reach her. Italy had become Rubens's spiritual home (he usually signed himself Pietro Pauolo') and he considered returning for good, but his success in Antwerp was so immediate and great that he remained there, and in spite of his extensive travels later in his career he never saw Italy again.

Return to Antwerp

Soon after his mother's death Rubens was "bound with golden fetters" to the service of the Spanish Habsburg regents of Flanders. The house that he built for himself, the pride of Antwerp, was filled with paintings, statuary, cameos, coins, and jewels from Renaissance and ancient Roman Italy. He built a private pantheon to house his antiquities. His biggest commission in Flanders was for the decoration of the Jesuit Church St Charles Borromeo in Antwerp (a building he may also have had a hand in designing). He was also the master decorator for its interior and provided oil sketches as designs for the ceiling paintings, on which he was assisted by his most talented pupil, Anthony Van Dyck, and others. Almost all his work there was destroyed by fire in 1718.

Settling permanently in Flanders, Rubens in October 1609 married Isabella, daughter of Jan Brant, a leading Antwerp humanist. He became not only the court portraitist but a major religious painter. His Baroque altarpieces of The Raising of the Cross (1610) for St. Walburga's in Antwerp and the Descent from the Cross (1611-14) for Antwerp Cathedral established Rubens as the leading painter of Flanders. Because of his prestige, he was allowed to live in Antwerp, rather than in Brussels, where the Flemish court was based. Rubens' international reputation spread partly because of the large number of works produced in his workshop, which came to employ a great number of assistants and apprentices. Many of the large-scale pictures that issued from his studio were in fact painted by these assistants, though the underlying design and certain key areas of paint were done by Rubens himself. To present models of prospective large-scale paintings to clients, Rubens might also sketch out the design beforehand in tones of brown, gray, and white on a small prepared wooden panel only inches high.

The demand for Rubens's work was extraordinary, and he was able to meet it only because he ran an extremely efficient studio. It is not known how many pupils or assistants he had because as court painter he was exempt from registering them with the guild. The idea of his running a sort of picture factory has been exaggerated, but even a man of his seemingly inexhaustible intellectual and physical stamina (he habitually rose at 4 a.m.) could not carry out all the work involved in his massive output with his own hands. Rubens both collaborated with established artists ('Velvet' Brueghel, van Dyck, Jordaens, Daniel Seghers, Snyders, and others) and retouched pictures by pupils, the degree of his intervention being reflected in the price. Generally his assistants did much of the work between the initial oil sketch and the master's finishing touches. Modern taste has tended to admire these sketches and his drawings (in which his personal touch is evident in every stroke of brush, chalk, or pen) more than the large-scale works, but Rubens himself would surely have found this attitude hard to comprehend, for the sheer scale and grandeur of the finished paintings gives them an extra, symphonic dimension.

Among Rubens' major works from the second decade of the century are the religious paintings The Last Judgment (c. 1616; Alte Pinakothek, Munich) and Christ on the Cross (1620; Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels) and the mythological paintings Battle of the Amazons (c. 1618; Alte Pinakothek) and Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (c. 1617-18; Alte Pinakothek). His pictures of wild animals culminated in the Hippopotamus Hunt (c. 1615-16; Alte Pinakothek) and similarhunting scenes.

Diplomatic career

In the period between 1621 and 1630, Rubens was increasingly used as a diplomat by the Spanish Habsburg rulers. His contact with the leading political and intellectual figures of Europe, as well as his gracious manner, made him the ideal political agent. Furthermore, as a painter, he could often act as a covert diplomat or observer. His first important diplomatic functions were in connection with the attempt of Spain to renegotiate the Twelve Years' Truce (1609-21) between the Habsburg-controlled area of Flanders and the Dutch Republic to the north. Rubens became an adviser to Archduchess Isabella, the regent of Flanders and daughter of the Habsburg ruler of Spain, Philip II. On her behalf Rubens tried to intercede with the Dutch, but war soon broke out again in the Netherlands between the Protestant Dutch and the Catholic Flemish and continued for the rest of Rubens' life.

Early in 1622 Rubens was summoned to Paris by Marie de Médicis, the widow of Henry IV and mother of the reigning king of France, Louis XIII. This Florentine princess, whose wedding by proxy Rubens had attended in Florence in 1600, commissioned him to paint two series of paintings for two long galleries in her newly constructed Luxembourg Palace. One cycle of 21 pictures representing episodes from Marie's life now hangs in the Louvre Museum, while the other proposed series of pictures, dealing with the life of Henry IV, was never completed. After six weeks of discussion and arrangements, Rubens returned to Antwerp, where he worked for two years on this, his most artistically important secular commission. He returned to Paris in 1625 to install the Marie de Médicis pictures.

In 1628 Rubens traveled to Madrid, where he tried to lay the groundwork for peace negotiations between Spain and England. There he was made an envoy by King Philip IV and sent on a special peace mission to Charles I of England in 1629. It is to Rubens' personal diplomacy that the peace treaty of 1630 between England and Spain can largely be attributed. In reward for his services he was knighted and given an honorary degree by Cambridge University. Charles I also commissioned him to decorate the ceiling of the royal Banqueting House (1619-22) designed by the court architect Inigo Jones as a part of Whitehall Palace. Finished in 1634, the nine huge panels allegorize the reign of James I, the father of Charles I.

Late years in Flanders

On his return to Flanders in 1630, Rubens was rewarded by the archduchess with exemption from further diplomatic missions. The peace Rubens had worked for nearly 10 years to achieve, however, did not last, and for most of the next 20 years Europe continued to be embroiled in the Thirty Years' War.

Having been a widower for four years, Rubens in 1630 married the 16-year-old Hélèna Fourment, whose charms recur frequently in such late figure paintings as The Garden of Love (1634; Prado Museum, Madrid), The Three Graces (c. 1638-40; Prado), and The Judgment of Paris (1638-39; Prado), as well as in Hélèna Fourment with Fur Cloak (c. 1638-40; Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna) and other portraits. Rubens bought the château of Elewijt in 1635, and in his last years he spent much time there depicting the rural life and scenery outside of Antwerp in such paintings as The Kermesse (c. 1636-38; Louvre Museum, Paris). His long-established interest in landscape painting reached its grandest and most emotionally romantic expression in such late works as Landscape with a Rainbow (c. 1634; The Hermitage, St. Petersburg) and Chateau de Steen (c. 1635-37; National Gallery, London). Rubens' major commission during these last years, however, was to provide for King Philip IV of Spain (the brother of the infante Ferdinand, who had succeeded Archduchess Isabella as regent of Flanders) models for about 120 scenes from the writings of the Roman poet Ovid and other classical authors to decorate the Torre de la Parada, the royal hunting lodge near Madrid. Rubens died at Antwerp in 1640 when gout, which had for months troubled his painting arm, reached his heart.

Achievement

Rubens was one of the most methodically assimilative and most prodigiously productive of Western artists. His abundant energy fired him to study and emulate the masters both of antiquity and of the 16^th century in Rome, Venice, and Parma. His warmth of nature made him responsive to the artistic revolutions being worked by living artists, and robust powers of comprehension nourished his limitless resource in invention. He was able to infuse his own astounding vitality equally into religious and mythological paintings, portraits, and landscapes. He organized his complex compositions in vivid, dynamic designs in which limitations of form and contour are discounted in favour of a constant flow of movement. Rubens' voluptuous women may not be to the taste of modern viewers but are related to the full and opulent forms that were the ideal of womanhood during the Baroque period.

The larger the scale of the undertaking the more congenial it was to Rubens' spirit. The success of his public performance as master of the greatest studio organization in Europe since Raphael's in Rome has obscured for many the personal intensity of his vision as evinced in such works as his oil sketch for All Saints (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) and in his deeply felt study for the head of St John in the Antwerp cathedral Descent from the Cross, as well as in portraits of his family and friends and in his treatment of the mood and grandeur of landscape. Rubens' most immediate influence was on Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Jacob Jordaens, and other painters in Flanders, but artists at almost every period have responded to the force of his genius. He is a central figure in the history of Western art.

Rubens' own deepest love as a painter, consummated by his second visit to Spain, was for the poetry, the control of glowing colour, and the sheer mastery in handling of oil paint that distinguish the art of Titian. In these qualities Rubens himself became supreme, whether with the brilliant play of fine brushes over the white reflecting surface of a small panel, or with masterful gestures often more than six feet long, sweeping a richly loaded brush across a huge canvas. Rubens's influence in 17th-century Flanders was overwhelming, and it was spread elsewhere in Europe by his journeys abroad and by pictures exported from his workshop, and also through the numerous engravings he commissioned of his work. In later centuries, his influence has also been immense, perhaps most noticeably in France, where Watteau, Delacroix, and Renoir were among his greatest admirers. Because of the unrivalled variety of his work, artists as different in temperament as these three could respond to it with equal enthusiasm.

Religious paintings (until 1616)

by Pieter Pauwel RUBENS

The Deposition,1602
Oil on canvas, 180 x 137 cm,Galleria Borghese, Rome

The Gonzaga Family Worshipping the Holy Trinity
1604-05
Oil on canvas, 430 x 700 cm
Palazzo Ducale, Mantua

Uchchhisht-Umarao Singh Jatav

DYCK, Sir Anthony van

(b. 1599, Antwerpen, d. 1641, London) by-Dr.Lal Ratnakar

Biography Sir Anthony van Dyck was a Flemish painter who was one of the most important and prolific portraitists of the 17th century. He is also considered to be one of the most brilliant colorists in the history of art. Van Dyck was born on March 22, 1599, in Antwerp, son of a rich silk merchant, and his precocious artistic talent was already obvious at age 11, when he was apprenticed to the Flemish historical painter Hendrik van Balen. He was admitted to the Antwerp guild of painters in 1618, before his 19th birthday. He spent the next two years as a member of the workshop of the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens in Antwerp. Van Dyck's work during this period is in the lush, exuberant style of Rubens, and several paintings attributed to Rubens have since been ascribed to van Dyck. From 1620 to 1627 van Dyck traveled in Italy, where he was in great demand as a portraitist and where he developed his maturing style. He toned down the Flemish robustness of his early work to concentrate on a more dignified, elegant manner. In his portraits of Italian aristocrats—men on prancing horses, ladies in black gowns—he created idealized figures with proud, erect stances, slender figures, and the famous expressive “van Dyck” hands. Influenced by the great Venetian painters Titian, Paolo Veronese, and Giovanni Bellini, he adopted colors of great richness and jewel-like purity. No other painter of the age surpassed van Dyck at portraying the shimmering whites of satin, the smooth blues of silk, or the rich crimsons of velvet. He was the quintessential painter of aristocracy, and was particularly successful in Genoa. There he showed himself capable of creating brilliantly accurate likenesses of his subjects, while he also developed a repertoire of portrait types that served him well in his later work at the court of Charles I of England. Back in Antwerp from 1627 to 1632, van Dyck worked as a portraitist and a painter of church pictures. In 1632 he settled in London as chief court painter to King Charles I, who knighted him shortly after his arrival. Van Dyck painted most of the English aristocracy of the time, and his style became lighter and more luminous, with thinner paint and more sparkling highlights in gold and silver. At the same time, his portraits occasionally showed a certain hastiness or superficiality as he hurried to satisfy his flood of commissions. In 1635 van Dyck painted his masterpiece, Charles I in Hunting Dress (Louvre, Paris), a standing figure emphasizing the haughty grace of the monarch. Van Dyck was one of the most influential 17th-century painters. He set a new style for Flemish art and founded the English school of painting; the portraitists Sir Joshua Reynolds and ThomasGainsborough of that school were his artistic heirs. He died in London on December 9, 1641. Portrait Portrait of a Man in Armour with Red Scarf 1625-27 Oil on canvas, 90 x 70 cm Gemäldegalerie, Dresden Portrait of a Member of the Balbi Family c. 1625 Oil on canvas, 132,7 x 120 cm Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati Portrait of Nicolaes van der Borght 1620s Oil on canvas, 201 x 141 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Self-Portrait 1622-23 Oil on canvas, 117 x 94 cm The Hermitage, St. Petersburg