Saint Martin and the Beggar (van Dyck) Saint Martin and the Beggar (van Dyck) Saint Martin and the Beggar is a c.1618 painting of Saint Martin of Tours by the Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck. The painting portrays the saint sharing his cloak with a beggar. It had been in van Dyck's studio for some time by 1621 and may have been completed around 1618. In 1621 he was commissioned by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Brabant, Ferdinand de Boisschot, to deliver a painting of St Martin for the church dedicated to that saint in Zaventem. Van Dyck gave him this painting in fulfilment of the
Anthony van Dyck his "Iconography", eventually a very large series of prints with half-length portraits of eminent contemporaries. Van Dyck produced drawings, and for eighteen of the portraits he himself etched with great brilliance the heads and the main outlines of the figure, for an engraver to work up: "Portrait etching had scarcely had an existence before his time, and in his work it suddenly appears at the highest point ever reached in the art". However, for most of the series he left the whole printmaking work to specialists, who mostly engraved everything after his drawings. His own etched plates appear not to