Cornelis Schut

Anthony van Dyck's portrait of "Cornelis Schut" is executed in pen and brown ink with brush and brown and gray wash on ivory laid paper. Schut was a Flemish painter who, like van Dyck, studied with Rubens and was influenced by the great master's dynamic Baroque style. This drawing belongs to van Dyck's Iconography series. His portrait of Schut shows the fellow artist with the directness and psychological penetration that made van Dyck the greatest portraitist of his generation after Rubens. The combination of pen and wash is typical: the pen provides precise delineation, the wash adds volume and atmosphere. The brown and gray washes create subtle tonal range giving the face three-dimensional solidity. This is an important document of the artistic community of 17th-century Antwerp.

Van Dyck's portraits of fellow artists form a unique record of the artistic community of the Southern Netherlands, documenting the faces of the men who created the Flemish Baroque.

This portrait exemplifies van Dyck's genius—the ability to capture not just features but character with a few strokes of pen and wash.