Artwork · 17th century · Anthony van Dyck

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Self-Portrait, from "The Iconography"

Anthony van Dyckca. 1640Etching; first state of seven24.1 × 15.6 cm

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At a glance

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A painter with a mop of curls and an upturned mustache looks back at us over his shoulder. The face is his own.
Anthony van Dyck drew it with a needle on a copper plate and printed it as an etching around 1640. This sheet is the first of seven states the plate went through.
Most of the paper is blank and only the head floats near the top, so you can see exactly where the artist's needle stopped.

Reading the picture

5 places to look closer

Tap a number on the painting to jump to its note, or a close-up to see that spot in the whole picture.

Start with the eyes. The near eye has swung sideways to meet ours. His body faces away, but his gaze is on us, as if someone just called his name and he turned. The shadows around the eye are not lines at all. They are built from hundreds of tiny dots.
Zoom in on the hair at the left. Fine needle lines curve and overlap like waves, rolling into loops and curls. Where the lines crowd together the hair goes dark. Where they spread apart it catches the light. With nothing but black ink, he makes the hair look glossy.
Move down to the chin. The mustache twists upward at the tips, and a small pointed tuft of beard sits under the lower lip. The shadow under the jaw is made from short strokes crossed over each other again and again. It is the darkest spot on the whole face.
What about the shoulders? A few thin lines mark the outline, and inside there is nothing. No clothes, no background. The face is worked with great care and everything else is left open. That is how the plate looked at this first stage.
In the lower right corner, the letters A VAN DYCK appear. Unlike the black lines of the face, they look brownish. The artist's name sits about as far from his face as the sheet allows.

When it was painted

Around 1640, van Dyck was in his early forties and working in London as a court painter. Born in Antwerp, he had trained as a young man in the busy studio of Peter Paul Rubens. In 1632 King Charles I of England made him his court painter and knighted him. The king, the queen, and their courtiers sat for him. Yet this painter also picked up an etching needle.

The project behind this print began earlier, in Antwerp. After returning home from Italy in 1627, van Dyck set out to gather the faces of famous people of his time into a series of portrait prints. Princes and soldiers, statesmen and scholars, painters and collectors all had a place. Most plates were engraved by professional printmakers working from his designs. Only a handful of heads were etched by van Dyck himself.

This self-portrait is one of them. He etched his head, scratched only a thin outline where his collar would go, and stopped. In December 1641 he died in London at forty-two, just days after his daughter Justiniana was born.

The copper plate outlived him. Around 1645 the Antwerp publisher Gillis Hendricx brought out a new edition of the portraits and used this plate for the title page. The engraver Jacob Neeffs added a bust and a stone pedestal below the face, but he left van Dyck's own etched head untouched. The sheet you are looking at was printed before all that, in the first state, when there was only the head.

Look at the sheet again. The wide blank space under the face is the space other hands would fill after the artist's death. On this sheet, van Dyck is still alone.

The painter

Anthony van Dyck

1599–1641

All paintings by Anthony van Dyck →

More by the same painter

Lucas van Uffel (died 1637)ca. 1622

Queen Henrietta Maria1636

Questions to think about

Look for itCan you find the parts of the face made with lines, and the parts made with dots?
Why?Why do you think van Dyck worked the face so carefully but left the shoulders and clothes empty?
What about you?Many of us retake a selfie again and again before we share it. Is that so different from a copper plate being reworked through seven states?

Same period