Second Antwerp Period

Nicholas Lanier was a musician, painter, and composer born in London to a family of French and Italian extraction. In 1626, he was named master of the king’s music to Charles I, and this portrait may have first brought Van Dyck into royal favor. Lanier also acquired a reputation as a painter and connoisseur of the arts, and Charles I entrusted him with the complicated negotiations for the purchase of the art collections of the Duke of Mantua. This portrait was displayed in Charles’s palace at Whitehall; when the king’s collections were sold after his execution, Lanier acquired the portrait for himself.

While in Brussels in 1634, Van Dyck painted portraits of Henrietta and Marguerite of Lorraine, sisters who had sought refuge there following Marguerite’s clandestine marriage to Gaston, Duke of Orleans and younger brother of Louis XIII of France. Here, the artist used rapid strokes of black chalk and white heightening (the latter now largely abraded) to document the fall of fabric in the sitter’s gown, the angle of her body, and the position of her hands. He often used blue paper from his years in Italy on, as is evident from several other sheets. While he paid close attention to the bulbous sleeves, lace cuffs, and narrowly tapering stomacher, his rendering of the sitter’s face is almost cartoonish and bears little resemblance to her appearance in the final painting.

The abbot and diplomat Cesare Alessandro Scaglia was one of Van Dyck’s most important private patrons. This drawing, which prepared a large, full-length portrait, may represent a design that was abandoned. In the final version, Scaglia leans against a pillar, whereas here he appears seated, as though enthroned, holding a document in one hand. The choice of buff (coarser, light brown) paper is not unusual in the portrait sketches of Van Dyck’s later period. As did blue paper, it provided the artist with a middle tone for the black and white chalks with which he sketched the pose, to guide his subsequent work on the painting.

Descended from one of the most ancient noble families in the Southern Netherlands, Marie-Claire de Croÿ was created Duchess of Havré in her own right by the king of Spain upon her marriage to a cousin in 1627. The child who appears alongside her is likely Philippe-Eugène, the future bishop of Valencia. The painting provides a sterling example of the grandiose and richly colored court portraits of Van Dyck’s second Antwerp period and makes use of a recurrent formula of juxtaposing an elegant female sitter with a diminutive male companion.

Van Dyck made these two studies of the diplomat Cesare Alessandro Scaglia in preparation for the painting of the sitter in adoration of the Virgin and Child.

Ernestine Yolande, Countess of Nassau-Siegen, was the daughter of Lamoral, Prince of Ligne. As with his study of the seated count, Van Dyck made this sketch in preparation for a massive family portrait. In the final painting, the countess cradles a lapdog, a symbol of marital fidelity. This attribute, however, is absent from the sketch, which focuses on the folds and highlights of the countess’s gown. Once he had finished drawing the dress, Van Dyck overlaid it with rough indications of her young son.

In August 1695, a French bombardment largely destroyed the famous town hall of Brussels and its art collections, including two large group portraits by Van Dyck depicting the city’s magistrates. The second of these compositions is recorded in this oil sketch, which depicts seven of the city’s magistrates flanking the figure of Justice. The compositional sketch was squared in the wet paint to enlarge the design (the final canvas may have measured as much as ten by twenty-six feet) and supplemented by studies in black and white chalk of costume and pose, as well as detailed head studies of the individual figures.