The National Gallery of London has eleven paintings by Van Dyck with a further ten consigned to that  limbo of ‘ascribed to’ and ‘studio of’.  Van Dyck paintings are not rare. Unlike Vermeer, it would be almost impossible to hold an exhibition of all the artist’s known works. The exhibition on now at London’s Royal Academy is the biggest retrospective to date for this artist born four centuries ago in 1599 with over one hundred works.
Just having run a phenomenally successful three months at his birthplace Antwerp, the show promises to draw even bigger crowds in London. Van Dyck was adopted long ago by the British as their own. He was court painter to Charles I who knighted the artist and he married a lady from the Scottish nobility. Stately homes of England have always had one or two essential Van Dyck family portraits hanging  in the gallery.
Historically he is of the utmost importance to the development of English painting. It was via Van Dyck and his peer Rubens that the English learned about Italian painting. Both artists had studied Italian renaissance painting and had assimilated the lessons of Titian into their style. Lely, Ramsay, Gainsborough, Lawrence and Reynolds, owe much to Van Dyck.
 

Titian, Chales V on Horseback, Prado	Van Dyck, Charles I on Horseback, NG London

We only need look at Titian’s Portrait of Charles V on Horseback (Prado) to understand where Van Dyck found his inspiration for the Equestrian Portrait of Charles I executed circa. 1638 (NG). We can also understand why the Flemish artist found so much favour at court. It is the most overtly flattering portrait in the history of art. Charles was a small pale man, not very imposing and not a great soldier. The heroic pose and monumental size of the figure in Van Dyck's portrait gave Charles the regal physical stature he lacked in reality.
The canvas is so large, (3.67 x 2.92 m) that during World War II Kenneth Clark, then director of the National Gallery had a tough time finding a safe house with a door large enough to allow the passage of  it in order the picture could be hidden away from the bombing. (Eventually they found Penrhyn Castle near Bangor.)

Van Dyck's flattering formula worked and he stuck to it. That is why the aristocrats loved him. He gave all models height and elegance by extending the ratio of the head to the body from the average one to six, to the fashionable one to seven. Gouty English lords were made to look like satin clad gallants and their short plump wives were elongated to appear as pearly-skinned goddesses. He paid particular attention to hands and they too, were always long, white and eloquent. One of the reasons you can always pick a Van Dyck at twenty paces is because all his sitters look the same. You could just as well screw the head off his portrait of Viscountess Andover (NG) and stick it on any one of his other courtly ladies, like the figure of Charlotte de la Trémoille, in the Derby family portrait (Frick, NY) without changing much. 

Van Dyck was equally adept at religious painting although he kept to his idealization of human figures. Thus they are more aesthetically pleasing compositions than spiritually moving images.  Has painting ever seen a more elegant and refined virgin than that in Van Dyck’s Virgin and Child with Saint Catherine of Alexandria the Metropolitan Museum, New York? Had the aristocrats allowed him more leisure time, he could also have bequeathed to the world splendid mythological paintings as evidenced by Cupid and Psyche (1640) in the Queen’s collection.

The artist died in London in December 1641. He was buried in old St Paul’s Cathedral, his grave bearing a Latin inscription which in translation reads: `....while he lived he gave immortality to many. Charles I, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, provided this monument for Sir Anthony van Dyck’.

ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS, London
Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641) Major retrospective