The presented engravings showed portraits of rulers, artists, scholars, patrons of the arts contemporary to van Dyck, created in 1630-45. The works came from the collections of the Historical and Archaeological Museum in Grodno (Belarus).
Van Dyck’s portrait art combined two basic traditions. The first was connected with the realistic art of Dutch bourgeois portraiture, while the second was connected with the art of representative aristocratic portraiture. Having assimilated the different artistic traditions, van Dyck created his own unique style of portraiture.
The main characteristic of van Dyck’s portrait art was a clear feeling for the beautiful, the subtle, the elegant. This feeling was expressed not only in the beauty and harmonious order of compositional solutions, elegance of attitudes and showy clothes of the portrayed, but also in their subtle spirituality, facial expressions, the way they expressed their emotions. The portraits show different characters, individual mental peculiarities. With particular mastery van Dyck conveys a person’s gaze – vivid and expressive eyes, moist or radiating a bright glow.
The portrait style of van Dyck had a significant influence on the development of European portrait art of the 17th and 18th centuries.
