English: Description in Flemish paintings C. 1600-C. 1800 III, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, 2010, cat.no. 69:

Technical notes: The support consists of a single piece of coarsely woven plain-weave fabric with a weave count of 12–13 warp and 12 weft. Cusping is present on all four sides. All of the tacking edges have been preserved with selvedge on the right and left edge. The painting has not been lined. The light brownish ground has been applied thinly and evenly and covers the texture of the fabric. The paint layer is semi-opaque with a few impasto highlights in white. The underpainting is in a somewhat lighter tone than the brownish ground. The subject’s face and hands have been reserved and then the body and background filled in. The paint layer consists of earth colours, white, black and blue pigments.

Provenance: Prague 1648 (?); Gustav III 1792, no. 192; KM 1816, no. 1093; transferred to the NM in 1866.

Bibliography: Cat. Gripsholm I, 1951, p. 94.

This well-made copy of Anthony van Dyck’s elegant portrait of Charles I is based on an original in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden.1 The original is inscribed CR and has the date 1637. This 17th century copy in the Gripsholm collection resembles the original in terms of the motif and individual details and also in format, although slightly smaller. Van Dyck’s original painting is a hip-length portrait of the king facing three-quarters left. In his left hand he is holding a glove while his right hand rests on a black hat placed on a table with reddish-brown cloth with gold embroidery. The subject’s hair is chestnut, his moustache and pointed beard brown, his eyes blue and he is wearing pearl earrings and a white lace collar that covers his shoulders. The king is wearing a black silk mantle decorated with the great star of the Order of the Garter and has a blue riband of the knight of the order around his neck. In the greyish-brown background a hanging drapery embroidered in gold can be seen. The biographies of Charles I contain references to two portraits of the king in the robes of the Order of the Garter with the great star and a knight’s riband around his neck. This copy is probably after the last new version of the king’s portrait painted by Van Dyck in 1637. The facial expression is similar to the portrait of Charles I in the Musée du Louvre (no. 1236) and in the large equestrian portrait belonging to the National Gallery in London (no. 1172). The original has sometimes been ascribed by earlier scholars to both Van Dyck and Peter Lely. Some of the portraits of the latter and also other successors have been inspired by the royal portrait of Charles I in the art collection in Dresden, among them a portrait from 1647 of the fourth Earl of Pembroke in Burghley House and Hannemann’s portrait of the second Duke of Hamilton (Royal Collection 1963, no. 213).

A large number of copies of Van Dyck’s portrayal of Charles I have been preserved, including those in Warwick Castle (dated 1637), Claydon House, Kedleston Hall, Burghley House, Ham House (possibly the second version of the original referred to in the biography), Brympton d’Evercy, Great Fulford, Kinnaird Castle, Port Eliot, the National Portrait Gallery in London (two copies), in a private collection in Switzerland and in Statens Museum for Kunst, in Copenhagen. In addition a number of copies have been sold through Sotheby’s and Christie’s. The copy in the Gripsholm collection is not, however, mentioned among other copies of Van Dyck’s portrait of Charles I in the complete list of Van Dyck’s works published in 2004.2 A mezzotint engraving of Van Dyck’s original was produced by John Faber the younger in 1738, and was based according to an inscription on Peter Lely’s copy of the original by Van Dyck, which the same source tells us was destroyed in a fire at Whitehall in 1697. There is, however, no evidence that Van Dyck’s original formed part of the royal collection after the Restoration according to Olivar Millar. The Grips - holm copy of the original now in the Dresden collections can be dated to the 17th century. It certainly belonged to Gustav III’s collection of art but the possibility that it was one of the many works seized from Rudolf II’s Kunstkammer in Prague in 1648 cannot be ruled out. KS 1 Oil on canvas, 123 x 96.5 cm, no. 1038. 2 For an account of other known copies see Susan J. Barnes, Nora de Poorter, Olivar Millar, Horst Vey, Van Dyck. A complete Catalogue of the Paintings, Yale University press, New Haven and London 2004, cat. no.

IV. 58, p. 475.[End]