Description:
This painstakingly thorough examination of van Dyck's extensive use of prints--including etchings, engravings, and aquatints--is the companion catalog to an exhibition in Antwerp celebrating the artist's birth 400 years ago, in 1699. Though he is best known for his paintings, van Dyck's prints influenced artists well into the 18th century and have always been prized by collectors and students of the history of printmaking. The book's introduction expresses the authors' hopes that it will prove accessible to the ordinary reader--and there are many sections that are fascinating. The descriptions of the 17th-century practice of ordering copper plates--which when delivered still bore hammer marks from the metalsmith who had created them, so that before beginning an etching the artist (or more likely his apprentices) had to make the surface flat--are just one example. Another is a description of the printmaking processes of the time that points out the "clots and pumples" on a plate that has been heated too rapidly, as a contemporary translator described the little bumps that appear in such well-known images as Rembrandt's Deposition, with its speckled ground. There is also a stunning array of images in various states, including preparatory drawings, proofs, corrected proofs, final prints, later engravings, and similar types of prints created in other ateliers of the time. Van Dyck acquainted himself with printmaking in Rubens's workshop, and that artist's flair is evident throughout van Dyck's fluid, flashy, finely observed portraits. Van Dyck was not Rubens, however, or Rembrandt--both of whom employed printmaking as simply another medium to bend to their incomparable vision. His prints seem to have been executed mainly as advertisements, but the artist is so accomplished that it is surprising how little his work is discussed today. This scholarly, carefully produced book is filled with large color plates, and its type is set, blessedly, in such a way as to make its brilliantly detailed text highly legible, unlike many tomes of this type. With the exception of the slightly confusing captions, which often omit dates, it is a book that will go far in correcting contemporary neglect of this important artist. --Peggy Moorman
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