Anthony van Dyck Anthony van Dyck Sir Anthony van Dyck (, many variant spellings; 22 March 1599 – 9 December 1641) was a Flemish Baroque artist who became the leading court painter in England after success in the Southern Netherlands and Italy. The seventh child of Frans van Dyck, a wealthy Antwerp silk merchant, Anthony was precocious as a youth and painted from an early age. In his late teens he was already enjoying success as an independent painter, becoming a master in the Antwerp guild in 1618. By this time he was working in the studio of the leading northern painter of
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