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Lot Essay
Painted shortly before van Dyck left Antwerp for Italy in the autumn of 1621, this striking picture of an Andalusian stallion constitutes the artist’s first independent grand-scale depiction of a horse. It was executed in preparation for the posthumous equestrian portrait of Emperor Charles V now in the Uffizi, Florence (c. 1621; fig. 1), van Dyck's earliest surviving equestrian portrait in a genre that hastened his reputation as one of the most sought-after portraitists in Europe during the first half of the seventeenth century. The canvas, painted with extraordinary fluency and vigour, provides a thrilling demonstration of the young artist’s virtuoso handling of paint and bravura technique. This is equally true of the sketch on the unprimed reverse – discovered after removal of the relining canvas following the 2000 sale – which, remarkably, stands as the artist's only surviving oil landscape study.
Van Dyck’s canvas – a forceful image of equine power – is a masterful performance in economy; using the prepared grey ground to superb effect, the artist has employed rapidly brushed strokes of dark brown paint to articulate the outline before lavishly applying highlights in lead white to capture the modelling and head of the horse. This expressive use of paint is typical of the artist during his formative years in Antwerp when his works are characterised by a richness and variety of texture that are in striking contrast to the restrained, courtly style that brought the artist such success during his final years in England. Van Dyck’s approach here compares closely with other studies of horses painted from this early period, the finest example of which is the Study of a Soldier on Horseback, dated to circa 1617-18, from Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford (present whereabouts unknown; fig. 2).
For the canvas in the Uffizi, van Dyck based his composition on Titian’s celebrated 1548 portrait of Charles V at the Battle of Mühlberg, a work that Rubens had previously studied for his equestrian portrait of The Duke of Lerma, painted in 1603 during the Flemish artist’s first visit to Spain (both pictures are in Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado; fig. 3). Although the Uffizi picture's compromised state of preservation has given rise to some attributional debate among scholars in the past, Susan Barnes noted that passages clearly resembled van Dyck's work from circa 1621 (op. cit., 2004, p. 95, no. I.101).
While van Dyck was required to turn to earlier portraits for his likenesses of the sitter, he clearly observed the horse itself from nature. The painter’s fondness for the animal is recounted in the much cited anecdote – described by André Félibien in his 1685 biography of the artist – of Rubens presenting van Dyck with one of the most beautiful horses from his stable before his most gifted pupil departed for Italy. After Thomas Gambier Parry acquired the present picture in 1859, he noted that the horse shown was traditionally thought to be that which van Dyck had received from his master. The horse here invites a comparison to Virgil, evoking lines in his Georgics referring to a foal: 'His neck is high, his head clean-cut, his belly short, his back plump and his gallant chest is rich in muscles... Again should he but hear afar the clash of arms he cannot keep his place; he pricks up his ears, quivers his limbs, and snorting rolls beneath his nostrils the gathered fire’ (H. Rushton Fairclough, Virgil with an English Translation, 1928, I, p.161).
In his 2002 Burlington article on this picture, Sir Oliver Millar left open the possibility that it was in fact an earlier version of the Uffizi commission, cut down at a very early stage before being adapted by the artist to a study of the horse. This theory was prompted by the revelation of an armoured rider in an X-ray carried out in 2000, at the time of the restoration treatment undertaken by Simon Folkes in London. Millar further noted that a later hand had ‘tidied up’ passages in the sky and landscape surrounding the horse (ibid.). A small version of the composition at Dulwich Picture Gallery – executed in oil on paper and laid down on panel – has not been discounted as a possible autograph study for the horse and would therefore stand as the first stage in this sequence of works for the Uffizi commission (Millar, 2004, op. cit., pp. 95-6).
The discovery of the landscape on the reverse of the original canvas, revealed following removal of the later relining, marked an important addition to van Dyck’s oeuvre. Painted with the unprimed canvas turned on its horizontal axis, the artist shows a steep tree-covered bank on the left, sloping down to a lake where a dog can be seen drinking. As with its counterpart on the recto, the handling is dazzlingly free. While it is known that van Dyck painted independent landscapes – five are listed in Antwerp collections in the seventeenth century – this is the only surviving oil in the genre from his entire career.
That the artist delighted in studying nature is evident in the many portraits and subject pictures with landscape backdrops or settings, but it is arguably in the group of surviving drawings where his veneration of the natural world is most eloquently expressed. In the introduction to the catalogue for the 1999 exhibition The Light of Nature: Landscape Drawings and Watercolours by Van Dyck and His Contemporaries, Martin Royalton-Kisch observed of van Dyck’s landscapes: ‘Although the accidents of survival must distort the true picture… these notations are set down with a skill and sensitivity to atmosphere that even the most distinguished landscape specialists active in Europe in his day found hard to equal’ (p. 10). It is telling that many of these works on paper, invariably executed in brown ink with brown wash and watercolour, were owned by later artists, including Jonathan Richardson Senior, Thomas Hudson and Joshua Reynolds, as well as collectors such as Richard Payne Knight, celebrated for his theories of picturesque beauty (see lot 21). Interestingly, Payne Knight also owned a grand-scale picture of a rearing stallion by van Dyck (sold in these Rooms, 25 January 2012, lot 12).
Millar noted that the sloping bank crowned with trees is very close to the landscape backdrop in the portrait, now in the Louvre, showing a father and young boy, possibly Joannes Woverius with his son (op. cit., 2002; fig. 4). That the Paris portrait can be dated to circa 1620 strengthens the argument that both sides of the present canvas were executed before van Dyck left Flanders. While Millar conceded that this landscape sketch does not betray a direct link with anything in Rubens’s work, he observed that some elements – the prominent twisting trees and glimpses of water – may well have been inspired by passages from the older artist’s compositions, such as ‘La Charette Embourbée’ and The Watering Place, pictures that both date to the years van Dyck was working in Rubens’s studio (the former c. 1617; St. Petersburg, Hermitage; and the latter c. 1615-22; London, National Gallery). In van Dyck's own work, there is a link in the treatment of the trees, albeit in general terms, with his drawing in the Louvre of A fallen tree, a work that corresponds very closely to a passage in Rubens’s Landscape with a boar hunt of circa 1618 (Dresden; Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister), which van Dyck is thought likely to have assisted with.
Van Dyck was undoubtedly one of the leading artists in the development of equestrian portraiture; his works in this field not only provide some of the defining images of the seventeenth century but have loomed large in the artistic psyche of subsequent generations. This picture marks his first essay in the genre, one that gained favour with key Genoese patrons such as Anton Giulio Brignole-Sale (1627; Genoa, Galleria di Palazzo Rosso), a commission for which van Dyck also produced a preparatory study of the sitter’s Andalusian horse. The years following van Dyck's return from Italy in the summer of 1627, known as his ‘second Antwerp period’, witnessed a magnificent troop of equestrian portraits, notably those of Albert de Ligne, Prince of Arenberg and Barbançon (1629-32; UK, Private collection), Francisco de Moncada, Marqués de Aytona (1633⁄4; Paris, Musée du Louvre) and Prince Francis Thomas of Savoy-Carignano (1634-5; Turin, Galleria Sabauda), a work aptly described by Julius Held as an ‘icon of power’. It was in England, where he arrived in the spring of 1632, that van Dyck's mastery in this field reached its climax; the celebrated portraits of Charles I on horseback in the Royal Collection and National Gallery of London (1633 and c.1636-7 respectively) stand as two of the outstanding masterpieces from his final years and arguably two of the most famous equestrian portraits in the history of western painting. In 1805, the portraitist John Hoppner observed of the former work, in which the King is shown with his riding master and equerry M. de St Antoine, that ‘a part of one of the hind legs is simply an outline on the bare canvas; yet under the circumstances in which it is seen, it is better, and more truly expressed, then if it had been, in the vulgar sense of the term, finished’ (Oriental Tales, translated into English Verse, 1805, pp. ix-x). Hoppner's words seem equally apposite when confronted with the present study.
Andalusian horses, derived from the original Arab stock, were highly prized by the European nobility from the fifteenth century and have long been associated with the Spanish Hapsburgs. By the sixteenth century, during the reigns of Charles V and Philip II, their status as the finest horses in the world was established, as illustrated through their increasing presence in equestrian portraits of Europe’s princes and monarchs, including that of King Francis I of France (1494-1547). On his wedding to Katherine of Aragon, King Henry VIII of England received Spanish horses from Charles V, Ferdinand II of Aragon and the Duke of Savoy. In 1667, William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle, the celebrated horse breeder, wrote of the Andalusian horse: ‘He is the noblest horse in the world... the most beautiful that can be... He is of great spirit and of great courage... and is the lovingest and gentlest horse, and fittest for a King in his day of triumph’.
Thomas Gambier Parry assembled a remarkable collection of early Italian Renaissance pictures for Highnam Court, near Gloucester, the house he acquired in 1838 and subsequently rebuilt. A manuscript inventory of the pictures, compiled by Gambier Parry’s son, Ernest, and dated July 1897, states that the picture had been in the collection of the Earls of Pembroke at Wilton, a house celebrated for its holdings of works by van Dyck. On a visit to Highnam Court in 1863, Lady Herbert recognised it as having been among the pictures that went missing from Wilton during the minority of the 12th Earl of Pembroke (b. 1791). However, the absence of any potential candidates in the Wilton inventories suggest this claim was unfounded. The catalogue also states that Gambier Parry acquired the picture before Sir Charles Eastlake had time to secure it for the National Gallery. Gambier Parry’s collection, which included important works by Bernardo Daddi, Lorenzo Monaco, Fra Angelico and Mariotto Albertinelli, survives substantially intact at the Courtauld Institute of Art. The van Dyck – the outstanding northern picture in his collection – can be seen in Henry Jamyn Brook's Private View of the Old Masters Exhibition, Royal Academy, 1888 (1889; London, National Portrait Gallery; fig. 5), where it is hung next to van Dyck's magnificent 1630 full-length portrait of Philippe Le Roy which in turn flanks, along with the pendant of his wife Marie de Raet (both London, Wallace Collection), Rubens' equestrian portrait of The Duke of Buckingham (c. 1625; formerly Earl of Jersey, Osterley Park, destroyed).
Van Dyck’s canvas – a forceful image of equine power – is a masterful performance in economy; using the prepared grey ground to superb effect, the artist has employed rapidly brushed strokes of dark brown paint to articulate the outline before lavishly applying highlights in lead white to capture the modelling and head of the horse. This expressive use of paint is typical of the artist during his formative years in Antwerp when his works are characterised by a richness and variety of texture that are in striking contrast to the restrained, courtly style that brought the artist such success during his final years in England. Van Dyck’s approach here compares closely with other studies of horses painted from this early period, the finest example of which is the Study of a Soldier on Horseback, dated to circa 1617-18, from Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford (present whereabouts unknown; fig. 2).
For the canvas in the Uffizi, van Dyck based his composition on Titian’s celebrated 1548 portrait of Charles V at the Battle of Mühlberg, a work that Rubens had previously studied for his equestrian portrait of The Duke of Lerma, painted in 1603 during the Flemish artist’s first visit to Spain (both pictures are in Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado; fig. 3). Although the Uffizi picture's compromised state of preservation has given rise to some attributional debate among scholars in the past, Susan Barnes noted that passages clearly resembled van Dyck's work from circa 1621 (op. cit., 2004, p. 95, no. I.101).
While van Dyck was required to turn to earlier portraits for his likenesses of the sitter, he clearly observed the horse itself from nature. The painter’s fondness for the animal is recounted in the much cited anecdote – described by André Félibien in his 1685 biography of the artist – of Rubens presenting van Dyck with one of the most beautiful horses from his stable before his most gifted pupil departed for Italy. After Thomas Gambier Parry acquired the present picture in 1859, he noted that the horse shown was traditionally thought to be that which van Dyck had received from his master. The horse here invites a comparison to Virgil, evoking lines in his Georgics referring to a foal: 'His neck is high, his head clean-cut, his belly short, his back plump and his gallant chest is rich in muscles... Again should he but hear afar the clash of arms he cannot keep his place; he pricks up his ears, quivers his limbs, and snorting rolls beneath his nostrils the gathered fire’ (H. Rushton Fairclough, Virgil with an English Translation, 1928, I, p.161).
In his 2002 Burlington article on this picture, Sir Oliver Millar left open the possibility that it was in fact an earlier version of the Uffizi commission, cut down at a very early stage before being adapted by the artist to a study of the horse. This theory was prompted by the revelation of an armoured rider in an X-ray carried out in 2000, at the time of the restoration treatment undertaken by Simon Folkes in London. Millar further noted that a later hand had ‘tidied up’ passages in the sky and landscape surrounding the horse (ibid.). A small version of the composition at Dulwich Picture Gallery – executed in oil on paper and laid down on panel – has not been discounted as a possible autograph study for the horse and would therefore stand as the first stage in this sequence of works for the Uffizi commission (Millar, 2004, op. cit., pp. 95-6).
The discovery of the landscape on the reverse of the original canvas, revealed following removal of the later relining, marked an important addition to van Dyck’s oeuvre. Painted with the unprimed canvas turned on its horizontal axis, the artist shows a steep tree-covered bank on the left, sloping down to a lake where a dog can be seen drinking. As with its counterpart on the recto, the handling is dazzlingly free. While it is known that van Dyck painted independent landscapes – five are listed in Antwerp collections in the seventeenth century – this is the only surviving oil in the genre from his entire career.
That the artist delighted in studying nature is evident in the many portraits and subject pictures with landscape backdrops or settings, but it is arguably in the group of surviving drawings where his veneration of the natural world is most eloquently expressed. In the introduction to the catalogue for the 1999 exhibition The Light of Nature: Landscape Drawings and Watercolours by Van Dyck and His Contemporaries, Martin Royalton-Kisch observed of van Dyck’s landscapes: ‘Although the accidents of survival must distort the true picture… these notations are set down with a skill and sensitivity to atmosphere that even the most distinguished landscape specialists active in Europe in his day found hard to equal’ (p. 10). It is telling that many of these works on paper, invariably executed in brown ink with brown wash and watercolour, were owned by later artists, including Jonathan Richardson Senior, Thomas Hudson and Joshua Reynolds, as well as collectors such as Richard Payne Knight, celebrated for his theories of picturesque beauty (see lot 21). Interestingly, Payne Knight also owned a grand-scale picture of a rearing stallion by van Dyck (sold in these Rooms, 25 January 2012, lot 12).
Millar noted that the sloping bank crowned with trees is very close to the landscape backdrop in the portrait, now in the Louvre, showing a father and young boy, possibly Joannes Woverius with his son (op. cit., 2002; fig. 4). That the Paris portrait can be dated to circa 1620 strengthens the argument that both sides of the present canvas were executed before van Dyck left Flanders. While Millar conceded that this landscape sketch does not betray a direct link with anything in Rubens’s work, he observed that some elements – the prominent twisting trees and glimpses of water – may well have been inspired by passages from the older artist’s compositions, such as ‘La Charette Embourbée’ and The Watering Place, pictures that both date to the years van Dyck was working in Rubens’s studio (the former c. 1617; St. Petersburg, Hermitage; and the latter c. 1615-22; London, National Gallery). In van Dyck's own work, there is a link in the treatment of the trees, albeit in general terms, with his drawing in the Louvre of A fallen tree, a work that corresponds very closely to a passage in Rubens’s Landscape with a boar hunt of circa 1618 (Dresden; Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister), which van Dyck is thought likely to have assisted with.
Van Dyck was undoubtedly one of the leading artists in the development of equestrian portraiture; his works in this field not only provide some of the defining images of the seventeenth century but have loomed large in the artistic psyche of subsequent generations. This picture marks his first essay in the genre, one that gained favour with key Genoese patrons such as Anton Giulio Brignole-Sale (1627; Genoa, Galleria di Palazzo Rosso), a commission for which van Dyck also produced a preparatory study of the sitter’s Andalusian horse. The years following van Dyck's return from Italy in the summer of 1627, known as his ‘second Antwerp period’, witnessed a magnificent troop of equestrian portraits, notably those of Albert de Ligne, Prince of Arenberg and Barbançon (1629-32; UK, Private collection), Francisco de Moncada, Marqués de Aytona (1633⁄4; Paris, Musée du Louvre) and Prince Francis Thomas of Savoy-Carignano (1634-5; Turin, Galleria Sabauda), a work aptly described by Julius Held as an ‘icon of power’. It was in England, where he arrived in the spring of 1632, that van Dyck's mastery in this field reached its climax; the celebrated portraits of Charles I on horseback in the Royal Collection and National Gallery of London (1633 and c.1636-7 respectively) stand as two of the outstanding masterpieces from his final years and arguably two of the most famous equestrian portraits in the history of western painting. In 1805, the portraitist John Hoppner observed of the former work, in which the King is shown with his riding master and equerry M. de St Antoine, that ‘a part of one of the hind legs is simply an outline on the bare canvas; yet under the circumstances in which it is seen, it is better, and more truly expressed, then if it had been, in the vulgar sense of the term, finished’ (Oriental Tales, translated into English Verse, 1805, pp. ix-x). Hoppner's words seem equally apposite when confronted with the present study.
Andalusian horses, derived from the original Arab stock, were highly prized by the European nobility from the fifteenth century and have long been associated with the Spanish Hapsburgs. By the sixteenth century, during the reigns of Charles V and Philip II, their status as the finest horses in the world was established, as illustrated through their increasing presence in equestrian portraits of Europe’s princes and monarchs, including that of King Francis I of France (1494-1547). On his wedding to Katherine of Aragon, King Henry VIII of England received Spanish horses from Charles V, Ferdinand II of Aragon and the Duke of Savoy. In 1667, William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle, the celebrated horse breeder, wrote of the Andalusian horse: ‘He is the noblest horse in the world... the most beautiful that can be... He is of great spirit and of great courage... and is the lovingest and gentlest horse, and fittest for a King in his day of triumph’.
Thomas Gambier Parry assembled a remarkable collection of early Italian Renaissance pictures for Highnam Court, near Gloucester, the house he acquired in 1838 and subsequently rebuilt. A manuscript inventory of the pictures, compiled by Gambier Parry’s son, Ernest, and dated July 1897, states that the picture had been in the collection of the Earls of Pembroke at Wilton, a house celebrated for its holdings of works by van Dyck. On a visit to Highnam Court in 1863, Lady Herbert recognised it as having been among the pictures that went missing from Wilton during the minority of the 12th Earl of Pembroke (b. 1791). However, the absence of any potential candidates in the Wilton inventories suggest this claim was unfounded. The catalogue also states that Gambier Parry acquired the picture before Sir Charles Eastlake had time to secure it for the National Gallery. Gambier Parry’s collection, which included important works by Bernardo Daddi, Lorenzo Monaco, Fra Angelico and Mariotto Albertinelli, survives substantially intact at the Courtauld Institute of Art. The van Dyck – the outstanding northern picture in his collection – can be seen in Henry Jamyn Brook's Private View of the Old Masters Exhibition, Royal Academy, 1888 (1889; London, National Portrait Gallery; fig. 5), where it is hung next to van Dyck's magnificent 1630 full-length portrait of Philippe Le Roy which in turn flanks, along with the pendant of his wife Marie de Raet (both London, Wallace Collection), Rubens' equestrian portrait of The Duke of Buckingham (c. 1625; formerly Earl of Jersey, Osterley Park, destroyed).