Jan de Wael

This portrait of the Flemish painter Jan de Wael (1558–1633) is one of a large series of printed portraits of the most famous personalities of his time, including European royalty, military men, writers and artists, known as the Iconography ('Icones Principum Virorum...'). Influenced by earlier Italian and French portrait series, Anthony van Dyck began organizing a print publication containing the engraved likenesses of more than a hundred prominent men of his lifetime in 1630. The artist himself only worked on 17 of the plates, including the present one, but delegating most of the work to professional engravers from his workshop. Many preparatory drawings and oil sketches for the plates have survived, but rarely come to the market. Recently, the preparatory drawing for the portrait of Willem Hondius, in black chalk, grey and brown wash, pen and brown ink, heightened with white, resurfaced and was sold for a record price at Christie's, New York (Old Master & British Drawings,1 February 2024, for $2,107,000).
As an etcher, he seems to have been only interested in the essentials of the portraits, the faces and heads, which he captured with great spontaneity and fluidity, and left it to the engravers to complete the plates by adding the garments and background. Van Dyck's virtuosity as an etcher, draughtsman and portraitist is therefore best appreciated in the early unfinished states, which are very rare.
The present portrait is an interesting example of this working method. In the first state, of which only one impression is known (Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. n. 2540), van Dyck had already completed the sitter's left arm and hand. Not happy with it, he burnished it out in the present second state. In the third state the arm was left unfinished but the sitter's name and artist's address were engraved in the text border below. In the fourth state the arm was completed by the publisher and engraver Gillis Hendricx.