Anthony van Dyck

Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) was the Flemish Baroque painter who became the leading court painter of Charles I's England. Born in Antwerp, he trained under Rubens, who called him his best pupil, and after seeing Titian's work in London spent 1621 to 1627 in Italy, mostly in Genoa, developing tall full-length portraits, and painted the Saint Rosalia series.

Back in Flanders he made the Iconography, etchings of contemporaries. In 1632 Charles I knighted him in London as principal painter and gave him a Blackfriars house, with a causeway built for their visits.

Though the king was a hard sitter under five feet tall, van Dyck painted him forty times and Queen Henrietta Maria thirty. Their relaxed elegance dominated English portraiture until the late eighteenth century, and the Van Dyke beard is named after his sitters' styles. He died at Blackfriars on 9 December 1641, his daughter's baptism day.