Dress
Van Dyck: Addressing the Dress
Image 1: Antonius Triest (1576-1657), 5th Bishop of Bruges and 7th Bishop of Ghent. Fig. 22 in book.
Long before photography, portraiture provided us with a visual record of our past. Without the artist, we would have limited visual history of the people prior to the nineteenth century.[1] This is not to say that the portrait was an honest and exact record of the subject, as often the people we see represented are first viewed through the artist’s lens and it is their perception of the world around them which is actualised on the page.[2] The artist’s own vision also had to be coupled with the expectation of their sitters and patrons, who wished to be portrayed in the best light.[3] Thus, idealising techniques were often employed, whereby the image of the sitter was often posed and illusory.[4] Dress became a tool used by artists to elevate the stature of their sitter, as subtle sartorial signals could indicate to the audience who a person was and what role they played in society.[5] When looking at the history of dress, Susan Vincent suggests we can view clothing as a way to help us understand the people of the past where clothing has the potential to uncover meaning:
Mine the garments on the body for meanings that wearers and viewers might have ascribed to them, for the feelings they may have promoted, and the resonances and connections they might suggest.[6]
This quote reminds us of the potential and the significance of Van Dyck’s Iconography, a group of etchings and engravings of some of the most influential men and women of the time, to help us understand the people of the past.[7] As very few garments have survived from this period, the series could be viewed as not just ‘a visual who’s who of the seventeenth century’, but they may also act as a record of the way in which those in the highest rungs of society wished to present themselves to the world, with dress being a key device used to do this.[8] It should be noted that we cannot view the series as a completely realistic account of dress of the time, as the clothing depicted in Van Dyck’s portraits were often not worn in real life, but used for the purpose of the portrait.[9] However, what can be established is a set of common characteristics which are repeated over such a large body of work and therefore, within the 100 prints a Van Dyck code of dress could be said to emerge, where through dress a sitter may be differentiated by class, gender, age, and influence. In this essay, the aim is to try to demystify the dress codes and conventions and show how Van Dyck used clothing to reveal the identity of his sitters.
Common Threads
While Van Dyck appears to use dress as a device to individuate, it is important to note that there is also a set of common characteristics that the majority of Van Dyck’s portraits share, a consistency in his treatment of clothing that distinguishes this series of prints. Some common features repeatedly emerge:
Fabric
Van Dyck’s father was a cloth and silk merchant.[10] It is perhaps his early exposure to fabrics that enhanced Van Dyck’s ability to capture falling fabric so effectively, as drapery is a key device used across all his portraits. Many inventories and letters reveal that people of the time did own some clothing made of embroidered and patterned fabrics.[11] However, Van Dyck always portrayed his sitters wearing plain satin and silks.[12] This could be seen as a tactical move to ensure the portrait was dateless and for his sitters to not be seen to follow the court fashions slavishly. The simplifying of fabrics could also have been for practical reasons. Van Dyck was an artist in demand and under time pressure to produce a larger number of portraits, by simplifying the dress he was able to speed up the artistic process or may have delegated the task to his assistants and engravers.[13]
Simplicity
Image 2: Jan Lievens (1607-1674). Fig. 45 in book.
To the modern eye Van Dyck’s costumes seem to be quite elaborate, however, as mentioned, he was actually an advocate for simplifying his sitter’s dress. He had a tendency to ‘unbutton, untie, or even undress his sitters’.[14] This simplifying of clothing in the portraits could also be seen as another tactical move, whereby Van Dyck subtly portrayed the high social status of his subject. This assertion may be accurate as the courtesy books of the period indicate that simplicity of undress was considered appropriate for only the highest members of society. Etiquette demanded that a man was fully clothed in the presence of a superior. Those at the top of the social ladder did not need to adhere to these rules of dress and could appear partially unclothed or wearing a hat.[15] Thus, the appearance of undress actually demonstrated social status, as such, Van Dyck satisfied his patron’s desire for clothing that was not overly embellished but that subtly indicated their high standing in society. However, Pointon warns that courtesy books only tell us how people were meant to behave, not how they actually behaved, so we can only use them as a broad guideline.[16]
Behind the seams
Image 3: Josse de Momper (1564-1635). Fig. 53 in book.
While the background in the portraits may not be considered directly related to costume, Van Dyck’s unobtrusive backgrounds brought the sitter prominently to the fore. In some cases, subtle indications as to the sitter’s profession were added, like the mountain range in the background of the portrait of landscape painter Josse de Momper or the books placed behind humanist and philologist Erycius Puteanus, which eluded to their profession.[17] Conversely, in most cases, the background revealed little about who the people were, emphasising further the important role dress played in discovering more about the sitter’s identity.
Image 4: Erycius Puteanus (1574-1646). Fig. 30 in book.
Court Dress
There appears to be some common characteristics in how the dress is depicted throughout the series. Firstly, all the portraits are in black and white and show a 3/4 length view of the sitter.[18] This immediately hinders our ability to fully see and analyse the dress as we are limited to a colourless upper body. However, with approximately thirty of the 100 prints, there may be a direct correlation between the prints and larger oil paintings by Van Dyck.[19] Here the origins of some of the dress depicted can be traced, which in most cases is a direct translation or a variation of the clothing portrayed in Van Dyck’s original paintings.[20] The larger paintings offer a better insight into the colour, texture and most importantly a full-length view of the outfit and its wearer, where some common conventions in dress for the lower body were on display. Stockings and breeches were usually worn by men, while women were often seen sporting floor-length mantuas: an over-gown usually worn alongside a full underskirt known as a petticoat.[21]
Sew-cial Standing
In comparison to the fast paced and trend driven fashion industry of the twenty-first century, the adoption of new styles in the seventeenth century may seem to have occurred slowly.[22] However, in a similar manner to the current situation, changes in fashion were usually as a result of evolving social and political narratives.[23] Clothing changed in response to changes in society. This was also the case in the seventeenth century when from c. 1625 Northern European countries seemed to be largely influenced by French fashion.[24] While France has always been synonymous with fashion and style, Stedman suggests the French influence at this particular time could be due in part to the French princess Henrietta Maria’s stay at the English court following her marriage to Charles I, where she brought with her the latest French fashions.[25] As Van Dyck was the official court painter to Charles I, many of his portraits were completed during his time in England. It could be reasoned that French fashion had permeated the English court and thus was largely represented in the series.
While broadly speaking, European countries were influenced by French fashion this could be considered an over generalisation, as it could be argued that the Italian court traditionally followed their own style conventions and it has been proposed that dress in the Spanish court stagnated until the middle of the seventeenth century.[26] Thus, a standardised style of dress becomes harder to find and define, as the series spans many European courts and a wide representation of sitters of different nationalities, gender, professions and classes.[27] The title page of the Iconography describes the series as made up of ‘Princes, Men of Letters, Painters, Printmakers, Sculptors as well as Amateurs of the Pictorial Arts done from Life’.[28] While this is a good overview of the people depicted, upon reflection, it could be argued that further subsections may be needed to address other topics of interest such as women’s dress. Therefore, four main categories of people could be said to emerge from the series: Women, Artisans, Intellectuals and Military/Public Figures. While these are very broad groups and contain much crossover, nevertheless, in categorising the series further, it may be possible to establish a more detailed view of how dress in portraiture varied across subsets of society.
Intellectuals
This group was perhaps the most modestly dressed. Learned men like Diodorus Tuldenus and Erycius Puteanus were often depicted wearing a sombre black dress with subtle adornment, usually a long coat, vest, and doublet (a short fitting padded jacket commonly worn in the seventeenth century).[29] This reserved dress may have established their identity as thinking men, more concerned with intellectual pursuits than fashion.[30]
Image 5: Diodorus Tuldenus, born Theodoor van Tulden (d. 1645). Fig. 31 in book.
Military/Public Figures
Image 6: Carlos II Coloma y de Saa, Knight of Santiago, 1st Marquess of Espinar (1566-1637). Fig. 13 in book.
Comprising military, nobility, clergymen and those engaged in public and political life, this group was often dressed in what has been referred to as gentlemanly dress.[31] This uniformed and formality dress sought to suggest qualities such as dignity and self-control.[32] In this instance, Van Dyck adopts the long tradition of portraying men in armour or heroic dress.[33] The collar is soft which further emphasises the rigidity of the armour, and the baton is used as a prop. The sitters often appear to break the frame, seemingly ready to exert physical force, exemplified in the portrait of Don Carlos II (Image 6).
Women
Image 7: Marguerite of Lorraine, Duchess of Orléans (1615-1672). Fig. 5 in book.
Although Van Dyck often simplified his sitter’s dress he was more than capable of conveying the wealth and status of his sitters by bringing out the richness and beauty of satin, lace, and jewels.[34] This is evident in his portrait of Marguerite of Lorraine (Image 7). Here an understanding of social context is essential, as at the time Marguerite and her husband were exiled from the French court.[35] Van Dyck played to Marguerite’s wish to project a defiant image of elevated social status and class in the hopes that the image would be disseminated widely.[36] We see here the potential and power of dress, particularly for women who had little political agency and needed to use whatever means they had to project a certain image to the outside world. This is in contrast to the portrait of Van Dyck’s wife Mary Ruthven (Image 8), where the dress is simplified. Here he omits the lace collar completely, as the collar was one item of clothing that was particularly prone to change in fashion.[37] By removing the collar and other fashionable items such as lace cuffs and scallop edges, he elevates the portrait from the everyday and may have achieved a more timeless effect, not dated by the fashions of the day.[38]
Image 8: Mary, Lady van Dyck, née Ruthven. Fig. 20 in book.
Artisan
Van Dyck also utilised similar effects in men’s portraiture by obscuring the rich details of contemporary fashion or hiding them behind draping.[39] This was a technique he applied largely when depicting his fellow artist Gerardus Segers (Image 9), where a loosely draped form of costume was used, similar in style to ancient roman attire.[40] As mentioned earlier sitters were anxious to wear costumes that would not go out of fashion and as such enlisted Van Dyck and his unique way of depicting dress to create a ‘timeless’ effect.[41] Artisans were depicted in ‘classicised’ costume drawing inspiration from ancient Greek and Roman civilisations.[42] This was often apparent in the background of the portraits, where occasionally Greek columns were featured.[43] This style of dress was universally perceived as timeless by the beginning of the eighteenth century.[44] However, while Van Dyck did forge a new style of representing dress, the style could not be completely divorced from the society in which it was a created.
Image 9: Gerard Seghers (1591-1651). Fig. 38 in book.
Weaving it all together
Dress was an important tool used by artists to specify who a person was and what role they played in society. It is within this context that Van Dyck’s portrait series Iconography helps us to understand the people of the past. Within the 100 prints, a code of dress can be said to emerge, as through dress a statement is made about the sitter’s occupation, class, gender, age, and influence. As such, Van Dyck used clothing to reveal and comment upon the identities of his sitters.
Sources
Christopher Brown and Hans Vlieghe (eds.), Van Dyck, 1599-1641 (London, 1999).
Antoine de Courtin, The Rules of Civility (London, 1695).
Alma Davenport, The History of Photography: An Overview (Boston, 1991).
The Fitzwilliam Museum, ‘Dyck’s portrait etchings’, Anthony Van Dyck [online exhibition] (2009). Available at: www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/gallery/vandyck/etcher/etchings.html
Emilie E. S. Gordenker, ‘The Rhetoric of Dress in Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Portraiture’, The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery, 57 (1999), pp. 87-104.
Emilie E. S. Gordenker, Van Dyck and the Representation of Dress in Seventeenth-Century Portraiture (Turnhout, 2001).
Avril Hart and Susan North, Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Fashion in Detail (London, 2009).
Ger Luijten, ‘The Iconography: Van Dyck’s portraits in print’, in Carl Depauw and Ger Luijten (eds.), Anthony Van Dyck as a Printmaker (Antwerp, 1999), pp. 72-91.
Arthur Mayger Hind, Van Dyck: His Original Etchings and His Iconography (Boston and New York, 1915).
Alison McNeil Kettering, ‘Gentlemen in Satin: Masculine Ideals in later Seventeenth-Century Dutch Portraiture’, Art Journal, 56 (2) (Summer, 1997), pp. 41-47.
Philip Kennicott, ‘At the Frick, clothes do make the man, and the woman’, The Washington Post (19 March 2016). Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/at-the-frick-clothes-do-make-the-man-and-the-woman/2016/03/17/95c60308-ead0-11e5-a6f3-21ccdbc5f74e_story.html?utm_term=.652e0c8921f2.
Diana de Marly, ‘Undress in the Œuvre of Lely’, The Burlington Magazine, 120 (908) (November 1978), pp. 749-751.
Elizabeth T. Pearson, ‘Engraved Portraits after Van Dyck’, Bulletin of the Pennsylvania Museum, 27 (144) (December 1931), pp. 47-49.
Roger de Piles, The Principles of Painting (London, 1743).
Marcia Pointon, ‘Book Review: The Anatomy of Fashion: Dressing the Body from the Renaissance to Today by Susan J. Vincent (Berg, 2009)’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 15 (3) (September 2011), pp. 395-400.
Marcia Pointon, Portrayal and the Search for Identity (London, 2013).
Aileen Ribeiro and Valerie Cumming, The Visual History of Costume (London, 1989).
Adeline M. Russell and Ela M. S. Russell, Biographical Catalogue of the Pictures at Woburn Abbey (London, 1890).
Joaneath Spicer, ‘Unrecognized Studies for Van Dyck’s Iconography in the Hermitage’, Master Drawings, 23/24 (4) (1985/1986), pp. 537-544 + 590-594.
Gesa Stedman, Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century France and England (Farnham, 2013).
Susan Vincent, Dressing the Elite: Clothes in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003).
Joanna Woodall, Portraiture (Manchester, 2008).
Footnotes:
[1] Alma Davenport, The History of Photography: An Overview (Boston, 1991), p. 76.
[2] Marcia Pointon, Portrayal and the Search for Identity (London, 2013), p.10.
[3] Joanna Woodall, Portraiture (Manchester, 2008), p. 19.
[4] Marcia Pointon, ‘Book Review: The Anatomy of Fashion: Dressing the Body from the Renaissance to Today by Susan J. Vincent (Berg, 2009)’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 15 (3) (September, 2011), p. 399.
[5] Susan Vincent, Dressing the Elite: Clothes in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), p. xv.
[6] Ibid., p. xiv.
[7] Ger Luijten, ‘The Iconography: Van Dyck’s portraits in print’, in Carl Depauw and Ger Luijten (eds.), Anthony Van Dyck as a Printmaker (Antwerp, 1999), pp. 72-91.
[8] Emilie E. S. Gordenker, Van Dyck and the Representation of Dress in Seventeenth-Century Portraiture (Turnhout, 2001), p. 29; Philip Kennicott, ‘At the Frick, clothes do make the man, and the woman’, The Washington Post (19 March 2016). Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/at-the-frick-clothes-do-make-the-man-and-the-woman/2016/03/17/95c60308-ead0-11e5-a6f3-21ccdbc5f74e_story.html?utm_term=.4fd653bea02c
[9] Gordenker, Van Dyck and the Representation of Dress, p. 29.
[10] Christopher Brown and Hans Vlieghe (eds.), Van Dyck, 1599-1641 (London, 1999), p. 36.
[11] Gordenker, Van Dyck and the Representation of Dress, p. 16.
[12] Ibid., p. 17.
[13] Roger de Piles, The Principles of Painting (London, 1743), p. 428; Gordenker, Van Dyck and the Representation of Dress, p. 9.
[14] Gordenker, Van Dyck and the Representation of Dress, p. 9.
[15] Antoine de Courtin, The Rules of Civility (London, 1695), pp. 23-5; Diana de Marly, ‘Undress in the Œuvre of Lely’, The Burlington Magazine, 120 (908) (November, 1978), p. 749.
[16] Pointon, ‘Review’, p. 397.
[17] The Fitzwilliam Museum, ‘Van Dyck’s portrait etchings’, Anthony Van Dyck [online exhibition] (2009). Available at: www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/gallery/vandyck/etcher/etchings.html.
[18] Elizabeth T. Pearson, ‘Engraved Portraits after Van Dyck’, Bulletin of the Pennsylvania Museum, 27 (144) (December, 1931), p. 47.
[19] Arthur Mayger Hind, Van Dyck: His Original Etchings and His Iconography (Boston and New York, 1915), p. 35.
[20] Ibid., p. 36.
[21] Avril Hart and Susan North, Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Fashion in Detail (London, 2009), p. 222.
[22] Aileen Ribeiro and Valerie Cumming, The Visual History of Costume (London, 1989), p. 54.
[23] Vincent, Dressing the Elite, p. xv.
[24] Gordenker, Van Dyck and the Representation of Dress, p. 29.
[25] Gesa Stedman, Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century France and England (Farnham, 2013), p. 165.
[26] Gordenker, Van Dyck and the Representation of Dress, p. 29.
[27] Luijten, ‘The Iconography’, pp. 72-91.
[28] Joaneath Spicer, ‘Unrecognized Studies for Van Dyck’s Iconography in the Hermitage’, Master Drawings, 23/24 (4) (1985/1986), p. 537.
[29] Hart and North, Fashion in Detail.
[30] Emilie E. S. Gordenker, ‘The Rhetoric of Dress in Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Portraiture’, The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery, 57 (1999), p. 99.
[31] Alison McNeil Kettering, ‘Gentlemen in Satin: Masculine Ideals in later Seventeenth-Century Dutch Portraiture’, Art Journal, 56 (2) (Summer, 1997), p. 43.
[32] Woodall, Portraiture, p. 19.
[33] Gordenker, Van Dyck and the Representation of Dress, p. 21.
[34] Ibid., p. 23.
[35] Adeline M. Russell and Ela M. S. Russell, Biographical Catalogue of the Pictures at Woburn Abbey (London, 1890), p. 35.
[36] Gordenker, Van Dyck and the Representation of Dress, p. 23.
[37] Gordenker, Van Dyck and the Representation of Dress, p. 23.
[38] Gordenker, ‘The Rhetoric of Dress’, p. 94.
[39] Gordenker, Van Dyck and the Representation of Dress, p. 23.
[40] Gordenker, ‘The Rhetoric of Dress’, p. 97.
[41] Kettering, ‘Gentlemen in Satin’, p. 43.
[42] Stedman, Cultural Exchange, p. 222.
[43] The Fitzwilliam Museum, ‘Dyck’s portrait etchings’, Anthony Van Dyck [online exhibition] (2009). Available at: www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/gallery/vandyck/etcher/etchings.html.
[44] Gordenker, Van Dyck and the Representation of Dress, p. 23.
Text: Ms. Ally Nolan, M. Phil. in Art History, ART+IRELAND, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Trinity College, Dublin.