“Le Roi à La Ciasse”

Abstract

WITH the Mom Lisa, the Sistine Madonna., and the Nightwatch, the portrait of Charles I in the Louvre belongs to that handful of pictures with which virtually everybody is familiar (Fig. 1).1 It has been reproduced endlessly, from the engravings of the late eighteenth century to the halftones of modern school books. It appears with the same monotonous regularity in treatises on the history of England as in books on Flemish art. Charles Sterling called it, with a polite bow to Fromentin, “perhaps the most beautiful portrait by Van Dyck,”2 and Mme Bouchot-Saupique spoke of it as “une des plus parfaites expressions de la peinture de toute une époche.”3 One should certainly expect that all the aspects of the picture had been thoroughly explored and that little is left for the modern critic except to share in the universal admiration which the portrait seems always, and deservedly, to have enjoyed.