R. Sands after Paulus Pontius after Anthony van Dyck. M. de Medicis

The Historic Gallery does not indicate the source from which R. Sands engraved the above image of Marie de Medici. That source turns out to be a portrait by Rubens’s most celebrated studio assistant and disciple, Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641). After leaving Rubens’s studio in 1620, Van Dyck lived and studied in Italy for six years before returning to Antwerp in 1627. A new interest in printmaking began the process that eventually led to his Iconography, a collection of one hundred engraved portraits of royalty, aristocrats, and artists based on his own designs, most of which were executed under his own close supervisions. Engraved portraits in this project were published individually and in various combinations during Van Dyck’s lifetime before the entire collection of one hundred was published in 1645-46, four years after his death. Marie de Medici one of only five women whose portraits were included. Her image in Iconography (fig. 2) was engraved by Paulus Pontius after a portrait Van Dyck had painted while Marie de Medici was visiting Antwerp in 1631 (Vey, III.105, pp. 332-33). That image was clearly the source for the engraving Sands created for the Historic Gallery in 1811.

The commentary that accompanies the outline engraving in the Historic Gallery details the difficulties that Marie de Medici faced—and created—in governing the nation. This account begins by defending her against the “odious conjectures” that she had somehow been involved “in the horrible attack which deprived France of the best of kings” (her husband). Then follow the dispute with her son, her banishment and their temporary reconciliation, and then the travails that led to her lifetime banishment and her ignominious death in Cologne. The final evaluation of her character, even allowing for the writer’s blatant gender bias, does suggest part of the challenge Rubens faced in taking her as the subject for such an extensive series: “Marie de Medicis, like many of her sex, was a woman of a weak understanding, with strong passions; vanity rendered her ambitious, and her ambition, analogous to her temper, was violent, jealous, and domineering. Confident, through want of information, revengeful through obstinacy; more desirous of reputation than of power, she only aspired to authority to enjoy the pleasure of submission. When we attentively read the history of this princess we are almost tempted to pardon Richelieu the ingratitude with which he repaid her beneficence” by banishing her (HG 7, n. p.).

The essay on Rubens in Melville’s copy of The Works of Eminent Masters briefly mentions Van Dyck as an artistic protégé of Rubens, but gives more attention to “the fifty engravers” Rubens employed (and trained) to engrave his works. Many of these went on to engrave portraits for Van Dyck’s Iconography. The passage about the intense grief Rubens suffered after the death of his wife Isabella Brandt in 1626 included the painter’s gratitude that his late wife “had none of the faults of her sex.” This was countered by the inclusion of a “malicious observation” that “she had, on the contrary, one very serious fault—that of loving her husband and his pupil, Vandyck, at the same time” (243, 239).  

Duplessis had high praise for both Van Dyck and Rubens in Melville’s copy of The Wonders of Engraving, with special praise for the Van Dyck portraits that were engraved for his Iconography. In these, “Van Dyck is not inferior to Rubens; he looks at nature from a different point of view, caring, it is true, more for character than grandeur” (135). Van Dyck’s portrait of Rubens for the Iconography  was his own variation on “the “hatted” self-portrait that Rubens had painted for the future Charles I in 1823 (CAT 185; Fig. 3), but Van Dyck renders Rubens hatless, covering his high, bare forehead with a non-existent spread of hair, and placing one hand over his heart (fig. 2).  

Like Van Dyck’s portrait of Marie de Medici, the above image of Rubens was engraved for the Iconography  by Paulus Pontius (Vey, fig. III.161, p. 371). That image, in turn, became the source for the engraving by George Cooke that accompanied the entry on Rubens himself in the Historic Gallery  (fig. 3; HG 1, 1807). Van Dyck in his portraits of fellow artists followed the 1623 self-portrait by Rubens by not including brushes, canvases, or any implements of the studio. They each presented the artist as a dignified gentleman with all the graces needed to engage as equals with royalty, aristocrats, clerics, and military commanders.

Melville provides his own verbal portraits of both Van Dyck and Rubens in “At the Hostelry.” Rubens is “hatted in rich felt, spick and span . . . with court-air of Lord Chamberlain.” His sophistication is matched by that of Van Dyck, "in whose well-polished gentle main / The practiced courtier of Kings was seen.” When Melville’s Franz Hals reminds Van Dyck of the attempt Van Dyck had once made to “lure” him from the “hearth” away to the “riches” and “patronage” of the court of St. James in England, “Vandyck, in silken dress / Not smoother than his courteousness / Smiled back, ‘Well, Franz, go then thy ways, / Thy pencil anywhere earns thee praise.’ (NN BBO 159, 156)