Straightway the King of England dispatched a messenger urging Anthony Van Dyck to come over to England.  The promised rewards and honors were too great for the proud and ambitious painter to refuse.  He started for England.

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In stature Van Dyck was short, but of a very compact build.  He carried the crown of his head high, his chin in, and his chest out.  His name is another added to that list of big-little men who had personality plus, and whose presence filled a room.  Caesar, Napoleon, Lord Macaulay, Aaron Burr and that other little man with whom Burr’s name is inseparably linked, belong to the same type.  These little men with such dynamic force that they can do the thinking for a race are those who have swerved the old world out of her ruts—­whether for good or ill is not the question here.

When you find one of these big-little men, if he does not stalk through society a conquering Don Juan it is because we still live in an age of miracles.

Women fed on Van Dyck’s smile, and pined when he did not deign to notice them.  He was royal in all his tastes—­his manner was regal, and so proud was his step that when he passed forbidden lines, sentinels and servants saluted and made way, never daring to ask him for card, passport or countersign.

He gloried in his power and worked it to its farthest limit.

Unlike Rembrandt, he never painted beggars; nor did he ever stoop as Titian did when he pictured his old mother as a peasant woman at market, in that gem of the Belle d’ Arte at Venice; nor did he ever reveal on his canvas wrinkled, weather-worn old sailors, as did Velasquez.

He pictured only royalty, and managed, in all his portraits, to put a look of leisure and culture and quiet good-breeding into the face, whether it was in the original or not.  In fact, he fused into every picture that he painted a goodly modicum of his own spirit.  You can always tell a Van Dyck portrait; there is in the face a self-sufficiency, a something that speaks of “divine right”—­not of arrogance, for arrogance and assumption reveal a truth which man is trying to hide, and that is that his position is a new acquirement.  Van Dyck’s people are all to the manner born.

He was thirty-three years old when he arrived in England.

King Charles furnished the painter a house at Blackfriars, fronting the Thames, to insure a good light, and gave him a summer residence in Kent.  All his expenses were paid by the State, and as his tastes were regal the demands on the public exchequer were not small.  His title was, “Principal Painter in Ordinary to the King and Queen of England.”

Van Dyck had worked so long with Rubens that he knew how to use ’prentice talent.  He studied by a system and turned off a prodigious number of canvases.  The expert can at once tell a picture painted by Van Dyck during his career in England:  it lacks the care and finish that was shown in his earlier years.  Yet there is a subtle sweep and strength in it all that reveals the personality of the artist.