Lucas Vorsterman

Anthony van Dycks etched portrait of Lucas Vorsterman from around 1630-33 belongs to the artists celebrated Iconography series, a collection of portrait prints depicting distinguished contemporaries that van Dyck began in the late 1620s and continued throughout his career. Vorsterman was a leading Antwerp engraver who had produced reproductive prints after van Dycks own paintings, making this portrait an act of professional homage as well as artistic self-presentation. Van Dyck etched the plate himself with a fluidity and economy that distinguished his prints from the more labored productions of professional printmakers, reserving the final engraving and publishing for specialists. The result is a portrait that captures the sitters character with remarkable immediacy: Vorstermans alert gaze and confident bearing emerge from van Dycks quick, calligraphic lines with a vitality that more finished engraving would inevitably flatten. The Iconography series represents van Dycks most sustained engagement with printmaking, and the etched portraits in particular reveal the directness and informality that made van Dyck the supreme portraitist of his generation, able to capture likeness and personality in a few strokes that lesser artists could not achieve with a thousand.

Van Dycks Iconography series transformed portrait printmaking from a reproductive craft into an original artistic medium. By etching his own plates with characteristic spontaneity before having them finished by professional engravers, van Dyck created a model for the artist-printmaker that influenced Rembrandt and established a tradition of creative printmaking that continues to this day.

An etched portrait of engraver Lucas Vorsterman from van Dycks Iconography series, capturing the sitters character with spontaneous calligraphic lines that demonstrate van Dycks revolutionary approach to printmaking as an original artistic medium rather than a reproductive craft.