Catalogue entry no. 29 by William W. Robinson:
Around 1630, Anthony van Dyck embarked on the extensive series of printed portraits of eminent artists, collectors, noblemen, soldiers, statesmen, and scholars known as the Icones Principum Virorum (lit., “Pictures of the Famous”; now referred to as the Iconography). It probably began with seventeen plates etched by Van Dyck himself, most of which depicted living artists from the southern Netherlands. He also launched a second portrait series, but for these he supplied drawings and oil sketches for reproduction by specialist printmakers. By March 1632, enough impressions from the two sets had appeared that Constantijn Huygens could refer to the “books containing portraits of famous men, by Anthony van Dyck.” Work on the second series continued for several more years. Its Antwerp distributor, Martinus van den Enden, eventually published eighty of these prints, but no formal edition appeared during the artist’s lifetime.
The Harvard drawing is Van Dyck’s study from life for an engraving by Paulus Pontius of the soldier–historian Don Carlos Coloma, marquis of Espinar (Alicante 1566–1637 Madrid; Fig. 1). Coloma served the Spanish monarchy for fifty years, many of which he spent in the Netherlands as military officer, governor, ambassador, and counselor. He wrote an account of the wars in the Low Countries covering the years 1588 to 1599 and also published his translation into Spanish of the works of the Roman historian Tacitus.
Van Dyck summarily outlined Coloma’s clothes and, with only a few strokes, deftly recorded his face and hair, capturing the gravitas and hauteur of the veteran commander’s demeanor. The text beneath the print identifies Coloma as Magister Campi. Gnalis in Belg., a Latin abbreviation for Maestre de Campo General, the Army of Flanders’ highest infantry rank, which he held from 1631 to 1634. Van Dyck could have sketched Coloma in 1628–29 or in 1633–34, but the sitting most likely took place between March 1631, when Coloma returned from a diplomatic mission in London and rejoined the army as Maestre de Campo General, and March 1632, when Van Dyck departed for England. As Horst Vey suggested, the artist may have drawn Coloma’s portrait on the same occasion as the unmistakably similar studies of two other Spanish generals, Don Alvaro de Bazán, marquis of Santa Cruz, and Don Manuel Pimentel, count of Feria. Of the drawings related to the Iconography, these three are the most economical, presumably because the artist had limited time with the officers. If Vey’s conjecture is correct, they must all date to between April 1631 and March 1632, the only period when the artist and the three generals were in the Netherlands simultaneously.
The Harvard drawing cannot have been the model for the engraving by Pontius, in which Coloma stands before a curtain dressed in armor, holding his baton of command and resting his right hand on the text space. Those elements were introduced in an oil sketch painted in monochrome brown tones on a panel identical in size to the print. Probably executed by a workshop assistant under Van Dyck’s supervision, the oil modello, like the Harvard study, is oriented in the same direction as the engraving. A drawing formerly in Weimar could have served as the engraver’s immediate model. It scrupulously reproduces the oil sketch but reverses the composition, so its orientation corresponds to the work on the copper plate. Although we know the drawing only from a murky photograph, it is clearly not by Van Dyck, but was presumably produced by his workshop or by Pontius.
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