Drawings

A barely indicated face, a sleeve crowded with folds, two hands tried out beside a standing figure: Anthony van Dyck’s drawings make the decisions behind his portraits unusually visible. Other sheets collect compositions encountered in Italy, prepare images for engravers or turn towards landscape. Looking at them by purpose helps explain why a few strokes can be enough in one drawing while another develops a face with great care.

Chalk, paper and the shape of a figure

In the study of Nicholas Lanier , a pale strip along the shoulder cuts through a mass of darker strokes. The arm resting towards the foreground gives the figure its breadth. Around it, short, overlapping marks gather into folds; the head remains much more lightly worked. Your eye can follow the clothing’s construction without needing every part of the person to have reached the same degree of finish.

The National Galleries of Scotland records this drawing as black chalk heightened with white on blue paper, dated 1628. The paper supplies a middle value: dark chalk deepens the folds and white lifts selected surfaces towards the light. Its colour belongs to the drawing’s means of description, alongside the marks laid upon it. ^[1]

A different balance appears in the Metropolitan Museum’s study of a lady and her hands . White outlines and patches pick out the long skirt, while stronger dark passages collect around the bent arm. Two enlarged hands float beside the figure. These adjacent studies invite comparison: the broad hand held almost horizontally has a quite different shape from the hanging hand below it. They let the problem of a gesture occupy its own space.

The Met calls the paper brown; the Frick records a grey-green, formerly blue support. ^{[2] [10]} A reproduction’s warm or cool cast cannot, by itself, settle the paper’s original colour.

These differences matter when looking across a group of drawings. The empty passages are often as legible as the worked ones. In the lady’s study, the long dress has room to spread; in Lanier’s, the body presses towards the edges. Neither effect requires a complete setting. Paper can hold the place of a background, separate a sleeve from the torso or leave an alternative hand available for further thought.

Preparing a portrait: costume, hands and family groups

The Morgan Library’s study of Anna van Thielen and her daughter Anna Maria Rombouts combines black chalk with pen and brown ink. Dated about 1631–32, it prepares a mother-and-child painting in Munich. The museum describes a more definite account of the mother’s clothing and a looser treatment of her young daughter, leaving room for changes in paint. The ink inscription naming Rubens is a later attribution, not the current identification of the artist. ^[5]

Such a drawing can preserve different kinds of attention within one image. A fold of fabric, the placing of a child and the relation between two bodies need not all be resolved together. The surviving sheet gives us the arrangement that Van Dyck explored; it does not supply a record of who sat first or how long a sitting lasted.

The Nassau family studies make particularly useful comparisons. In the drawing of Ernestine Yolande with her son , her sleeves form large, angular shapes and the skirt occupies most of the lower sheet. The child stands at her side, with outlines that meet and cross those of the dress. The British Museum dates the drawing to about 1634 and relates it to the family portrait at Firle Place. ^[8]

The separate seated study of Johann gives the body a broad base. The open knees, chair arms and long diagonal folds establish a stable seated figure, though his face is scarcely developed. It belongs to the same family-portrait project. The museum records a watermark shared with Ernestine’s sheet, suggesting a connection in working circumstances; a watermark cannot establish the precise day or order of their making. ^[11]

Turn to Johann standing in armour and the arrangement changes. The shell-like breastplate, broad upper sleeves and narrow lower legs build a military silhouette. The baton extends away from the body; the other arm gathers the helmet beside it. Here the reflective surfaces receive more attention than the small, faint head. The British Museum links the sheet to the separate standing portrait in the Liechtenstein Collections. ^[9]

There is a useful physical connection that can disappear when these images are reproduced separately. Ernestine’s drawing is the recto—the front—of the sheet with Quintijn Simons on its verso, or reverse. Johann’s armour study shares its paper with the two studies of Cesare Alessandro Scaglia. Seated Johann is a third sheet. ^{[8] [9] [11]} Recognising these relationships prevents a sequence of digital images from becoming an imaginary sequence of separate objects.

Scaglia also appears in an independent seated drawing in the Fondation Custodia. Its wide spread of robes and sideways extension of the arm make an expansive figure. The National Gallery’s account of his painted portrait describes the change from a seated proposal to the standing, column-supported figure in the painting of 1634. ^[12] The two Scaglia studies on the British Museum verso belong instead to his devotional portrait with the Virgin and Child. ^[9] A sitter’s name alone cannot identify a drawing’s intended picture.

When a drawing carries the likeness into print

The portrait of Hendrik van Balen at the Getty provides a revealing change of emphasis. The eyes, brows, moustache and curling hair are carefully articulated. The patterned collar surrounds the head, while the cloak below opens into broader, more loosely gathered strokes. On the left of the image, a lightly drawn hand rests over the curved form of a bust. The face can hold the eye even when you step back from the sheet.

Van Balen had been Van Dyck’s teacher. The Getty dates the black-chalk drawing to about 1627–32 and identifies its connection with the portrait print series usually called the Iconography . ^[6] The Getty’s collection catalogue traces a related grisaille—a painting in shades of grey—and Paul Pontius’s engraving, which reverses the drawn composition. ^[7] This gives a concrete example of an image being developed across different media, with opportunities to adjust its setting and attributes along the way.

Transfer could leave physical evidence: Gentileschi and Gevaerts studies were incised, and an Inigo Jones study was squared. ^[13] Incision and a grid answer practical problems of transfer, whereas the separate hand studies beside the Met lady answer problems of pose. The two kinds of drawing deserve different questions.

A convincing face need not establish a sitting: the Inigo Jones study probably follows an earlier portrait. ^[13] The fuller history of plates, printmakers and successive states belongs to Van Dyck’s prints ; the drawings show one part of that collaborative process.

The Italian Sketchbook: collecting compositions

The Italian Sketchbook is a different kind of working object. Pen and brown ink predominate, sometimes with wash; inscriptions record colours, textures and locations. ^[3] Text and image can carry complementary information, preserving something that a small monochrome sketch could not convey alone.

Titian’s name accompanies almost sixty designs. These are not sixty original paintings examined: sources include prints and painted replicas. Veronese, Raphael and Annibale Carracci also appear, alongside everyday observations and preparatory ideas. ^[3]

A copied design reveals what Van Dyck wanted to retain, without necessarily establishing where he stood when drawing it. Simplification could be useful: an arrangement of figures might be carried forward without reproducing every detail.

One leaf has a particularly strong documentary voice. Beside a portrait of Sofonisba Anguissola, Van Dyck wrote that he met her in Palermo on 12 July 1624. His Italian inscription records her advice about the placement of light while he portrayed her. The British Museum publishes the inscription and identifies the portrait as drawn from life. ^[14] Here the encounter has unusually specific support in the artist’s own writing. It should not become a model for invented conversations around less documented sheets.

Later tracing over some chalk studies also cautions against assigning every visible intervention to Van Dyck. ^[3]

Landscape beyond the portrait studio

Van Dyck’s drawings also include landscape. The British Museum’s Study of Trees , inventory Oo,9.50, is catalogued around 1634 in pen and brown ink with watercolour. ^[4] Those materials and that subject broaden the picture substantially. A discussion centred entirely on chalk portrait studies would leave this part of his practice out of sight.

The date places the work in the years of his established English career, but neither the title nor the medium identifies the precise place or proves an outdoor sketching excursion. It is enough to recognise that trees could become a subject in their own right. The surviving work asks us to look beyond the painted landscapes that frame courtly sitters and to consider landscape drawing as another use of his time and materials.

Equestrian ideas and the freedom to change

Two small equestrian designs show how much a drawing could propose. The British Museum’s allegorical commander sits above a mass of falling figures. Dark wash beneath the horse sets the raised forelegs against a dense lower corner, while a floating figure reaches across from above. The tightly stacked forms make the sheet feel crowded with incident.

The Frick dates this design to the Italian period, 1621–about 1627. The commander is unidentified, and no executed painting is established. ^[15] Its invented ceremonial world remains worth examining without attaching it to a particular campaign. The subject combines portraiture with a programme of triumph; the drawing’s success does not depend on our being able to name its rider.

The Met’s man on horseback with his groom uses much more open paper. The horse’s arched neck, trailing mane, tail and sash spread the movement across the sheet. The attendant bends behind it. Repeated outlines give the legs and flanks a restless quality, leaving the viewer able to follow the shape without mistaking it for a fixed contour.

The Met dates this pen-and-ink drawing about 1628–32 and tentatively connects it with Albert de Ligne, Count of Arenberg. Its identifying inscription is nineteenth-century, so it cannot serve as Van Dyck’s own naming of the sitter. ^[16] The Frick proposed an earlier date, 1620–21, while retaining the later alternative. ^[17] These are competing readings of one drawing, not evidence for two separate sheets.

Names, dates and the limits of certainty

The small Boston Standing Woman in a Nun’s Habit is a good test of how to handle a familiar title. The figure stands between a lightly suggested landscape and strongly hatched architecture. Her long robe gathers at the waist and extends into a narrow train. These arrangements make a complete portrait setting with relatively few descriptive marks.

The Frick tentatively proposed Isabella Clara Eugenia as the sitter. ^[18] Blaise Ducos rejects that identification in his Louvre catalogue, pointing to the elongated figure, small head and Genoese character of the setting. ^[19] The safer title retains an unknown woman. Religious dress supplies evidence about appearance; it does not establish her name or a life spent in a convent.

Dating can remain unsettled even when two objects are convincingly related. The British Museum dates Johann’s standing armour study about 1634; the Liechtenstein Collections dates the associated painting about 1627. ^{[9] [20]} Similarly, Edinburgh’s Lanier drawing is dated 1628, while the Kunsthistorisches Museum currently dates the painting about 1632. ^{[1] [21]} The connection between a study and a painting is a separate question from agreement about their dates.

For individual drawings, the most useful approach is to keep the title, support, collection and side of the sheet together. A later inscription may preserve an old identification or attribution, as the Morgan’s Rubens inscription and the Met’s Arenberg inscription demonstrate. ^{[5] [16]} It needs to be weighed alongside the drawing and its history. Broader questions about attribution and studio participation continue on Van Dyck’s workshop and influence .

Fifteen drawings and drawing subjects to explore

These entries offer routes into the different tasks described above. Recto and verso entries remain separate subjects while identifying their shared paper.