Art

There are a number of reasons for hurrying to Antwerp to catch this summer's quatercentennial Van Dyck exhibition before it transfers to the Royal Academy in the autumn. For one thing, one of the more interesting ancillary shows - albeit with the deeply uninteresting title of "Van Dyck: a gifted engraver" - will not be crossing the Channel to London come September. For another, the Royal Antwerp Museum of Fine Arts has given the principal exhibition of Van Dyck's oil paintings the kind of monumental hang that Burlington House, with the best will in the world, will simply not be able to match. The most pressing reason for hopping on to the Eurostar, though, is that seeing all those Van Dycks in situ reminds us of a truth that we Britons have never quite come to terms with: that Sir Anthony Van Dyck - English knighthood, Scottish wife and burial in Old St Paul's notwithstanding - was not a British painter.

Yes, of course, we've always known that he was Flemish really, but only in the vague way that we think of Handel as having been German or Henry James American. It is not just the iconic portraits of Charles I's court or Herrick's description of Van Dyck as "the glory of the World" that locates him at the centre of English artistic life. His naturalistic portrait style and, more precisely, his loose, liquid handling of drapery were to inform English portraiture for 200 years. The process of Van Dyck's appropriation would seem to have gone something like this. Painters such as Reynolds and Gainsborough were still working in what was patently a Van Dyckian manner; they were British; so, therefore, was Van Dyck.

Look at the works in Antwerp, though, and something else becomes apparent. If seeing Van Dyck in his home town recalls the debt he owes his master - another not-quite-so-British knight, Sir Peter Paul Rubens - it also exposes a noticeable un-Antwerpishness in his paintings. Or, rather, in his later paintings. It would be simplistic to divide Van Dyck's career into the periods pre- and post-1632, but not entirely so. Take a picture such as his portrait of the young Prince Rupert of the Palatinate (1631) and you will see what is in essence a Rubenesque handling of paint, wedded to the Genoese form Van Dyck had adopted during his travels in Italy from 1621-27. (His stay in Italy was roughly as long as his sojourn in England, though no sane Italian would claim Van Dyck as a countryman.) The young Rupert of the Rhine lolls stiffly against the picture plane, his black costume a work of geometry, rather than of nature, the portrait's background divided into a rigid hierarchy of pillar, drapery and flattened landscape. Look at Van Dyck's picture of the same prince with his brother, painted a mere five years afterwards, and you sense what might, in other circumstances, be called a revolution. Now Rupert stands in androgynous contrapposto, his gaze directed into some abstracted middle distance, the armour he wears no longer a stock borrowing from the wardrobe of royal iconography but a living, oily, gleaming thing. What had happened between the two pictures?

In a word: England. In 1632 Van Dyck had been summoned to London by Charles I, who saw in the Fleming's allegorical works echoes of his own beloved Titian. Carew sums up the informal frivolity of Charles's court thus: "Tourneys, masques, theatres better become/Our Halcyon days; what though the German drum/Bellow for freedom and revenge, the noise/Concerns us not." For Van Dyck, this patronal openness meant various things. His status as an artist was suddenly raised immeasurably: his ravishing self-portrait with Endymion Porter, a gentleman of the king's bedchamber and friend, suggests something of the degree of his social change. And then there was the change of costume. Herrick had also written of the "fine distraction" of dress at the Caroline court, and Van Dyck's portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria in blue hunting garb still seems shocking when seen beside the copy-book formality of his pre-English royal portraits.

Dwarves and apes were stock exotics, but Van Dyck's use of them in his portrait of the queen introduces a novel sense of the carnival, of the possibility of rule-breaking. They are a neat enough emblem of his English period, which was precisely about the breaking of rules. Unlike in Italy, there was no great local painterly tradition to work either with or against: Van Dyck could break away to his heart's content. The first thing to go was brushwork. The peacock costume of Charles's court didn't merely provide the Fleming with an opportunity for experimenting with colour. Sensing that English dress also somehow symbolised a rejection of fastidiousness, Van Dyck felt free to paint it in as unfastidious a manner as he could muster - in loose, brilliant, expressive strokes.

Then there was picture space. Where Prince Rupert had been imprisoned in his pictorial mise en scene - an unintended trope, perhaps, of the stifling life at the Elector's court - Henrietta Maria commands a landscape whose naturalistic openness is emphasised by the presence of a living tree in the picture's middle ground. With this breaking down of walls went a greater sense of intimacy with the sitter and thus of that Van Dyckian trademark, psychological insight.

As you walk around the Antwerp fine arts museum, the idea that a 17th-century painter might have found in London those qualities of classlessness and emotional honesty that made him great may strike you as ironic: they seem so un-English, somehow. But then so was England.

"Anthony Van Dyck 1599-1641", Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, to 15 August, daily, 10am-6pm (advance booking: 0171-734 4555). The exhibition opens at the Royal Academy on 11 September

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