Behold - the young Van Dyck
November 16 2012
Picture: Prado/Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenen Künste, Vienna
Christmas has come early for this Van Dyck anorak, with the apparent news that Van Dyck's earliest Self-Portrait (above, c.1615) has been cleaned.
I say apparent, because I don't know quite when it happened - but the image on the Prado's website for their forthcoming 'Young Van Dyck' exhibition shows the picture looking very different to all previous illustrations of the picture. So I presume it has been cleaned for the exhibition. Before, the picture was hard to interpret thanks to what looked like ingrained dirt and old varnish remaining in the impasto (see below, and here), and, from the photos at least, was a trifle underwhelming. Now, however, the picture looks as wonderfully fresh and spontaneous as you'd expect a youthful Van Dyck self-portrait to look. It's completely fantastic.
The exhibition opens on 20th November, till 3rd March 2013.
Incidentally, please note how different this undoubted self-portrait is to the Portrait of Van Dyck by Rubens at the Rubenshuis (below) of about the same date, which has lately (and most curiously, in my view) been attributed to Van Dyck. I see for now that the Rubenshuis website still identifies the picture as by Rubens, which is a relief. You can see a high-res image of the Rubens here for comparison with the Prado picture.
