Between the years 1632 and 1642, Van Dyck painted a great number of portraits of the King.  It is from these that we obtain our vivid idea of the first Charles’s gentleness and refinement.  He has a sad look, as though the world were too much for him and he had fallen upon evil days.  We can see him year by year looking sadder, but Van Dyck makes the sadness only emphasize the distinction.

Queen Henrietta Maria was painted even more often than the King.  She is always dressed in some bright shimmering satin; sometimes in yellow, like the sleeve of William II.’s dress, sometimes in the purest white.  She looks very lovely in the pictures, but lovelier still are the groups of her children.  Even James II. was once a bewitching little creature in frocks with a skull-cap on his head.  His sister Mary, aged six, in a lace dress, with her hands folded in front of her, looks very good and grown-up.  When she became older, though not even then really grown-up, she married the William of Orange of our picture.  He came from Holland and stayed at the English Court, as a boy of twelve, and it was then that Van Dyck painted this portrait of him.

Later on, when they were married, Van Dyck painted them together, but William was older and looked a little less beautiful, and Mary had lost the charm of her babyhood.  With all her royal dignity and solemnity, she is a perfect child in these pictures.  Refined people, loving art, have grown so fond of the Van Dyck children, that often when they wish their own to look particularly bewitching at some festivity, they dress them in the costumes of the little Mary and Elizabeth Stuart, and revive the skull-caps and the lace dresses for a fresh enjoyment.

Van Dyck’s patrons in England, other than the King, were mostly noblemen and courtiers.  They lived in the great houses, which had been built in many parts of the country during the reigns of Elizabeth and her successors.  The rooms were spacious, with high walls that could well hold the large canvases of Van Dyck.  Sometimes a special gallery was built to contain the family portraits, and Van Dyck received a commission to paint them all.  Often, several copies of the same picture were ordered at one time to be sent as presents to friends and relations.  Usually the artist painted but one himself; the rest were copies by his assistants.

Van Dyck’s portraits were designed to suit great houses.  In a small room, which a portrait by Holbein would have decorated nobly, a canvas by Van Dyck would have been overpowering.  In spite of the fact that the expressions on the faces are often intimate and appealing, domesticity is not the mark of his art.  In Van Dyck’s picture of our ‘heir of fame,’ the white linen, the yellow satin, and the armour please us as befitting the lovely face.  There is a glimmer of light on the armour, but you see how different is Van Dyck’s treatment of it from Rembrandt’s.  Van Dyck painted it as an article of dress in due subordination to the face, not as an opportunity for reflecting light and becoming the most important thing in the picture.