Studio
His great success compelled van Dyck to maintain a large workshop in London, a studio which was to become "virtually a production line for portraits". According to a visitor to his studio he usually only made a drawing on paper, which was then enlarged onto canvas by an assistant; he then painted the head himself. The clothes were left at the studio and often sent out to specialists. In his last years these studio collaborations accounted for some decline in the quality of work. In addition many copies untouched by him, or virtually so, were produced by the workshop, as well as by professional copyists and later painters; the number of paintings ascribed to him had by the 19th century become huge, as with Rembrandt, Titian and others. However, most of his assistants and copyists could not approach the refinement of his manner, so compared to many masters consensus among art historians on attributions to him is usually relatively easy to reach, and museum labelling is now mostly updated (country house attributions may be more dubious in some cases). The relatively few names of his assistants that are known are Dutch or Flemish; he probably preferred to use trained Flemings, as no English equivalent training yet existed. Adriaen Hanneman (1604–71) returned to his native Hague in 1638 to become the leading portraitist there. Van Dyck's enormous influence of English art does not come from a tradition handed down through his pupils; in fact it is not possible to document a connection to his studio for any English painter of any significance.
Read more about this topic: Anthony Van Dyck
Famous quotes containing the word studio:
“[T]hose wholemeal breads ... look hand-thrown, like studio pottery, and are fine if you have all your teeth. But if not, then not. Perhaps the rise ... of the ... factory-made loaf, which may easily be mumbled to a pap betweeen gums, reflects the sorry state of the nation’s dental health.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“Surely it is one of the requisites of a tasteful garb that the expression of effort to please shall be wanting in it; that the mysteries of the toilet shall not be suggested by it; that the steps to its completion shall be knocked away like the sculptor’s ladder from the statue, and the mental force expended upon it be swept away out of sight like the chips on the studio floor.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)
“The studio has become the crucible where human genius at the apogee of its development brings back to question not only that which is, but creates anew a fantastic and conventional nature which our weak minds, impotent to harmonize it with existing things, adopt by preference, because the miserable work is our own.”
—Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863)