During the past twenty years the public has become so educated in matters artistic that it wishes at once to definitely assign a certain position to an artist with whose works it is familiar. We live in an age of comparison, and as opportunities for its exercise, owing to the cheapening of travel, are so manifestly improved of recent years, a more just estimation exists in the mind of the public regarding an artist's worth than formerly. Van Dyck, as I said at the beginning of the opening chapter, has never fallen from the high position he occupied in his own day. He has always appealed to the student and the artist of every nationality, and if we survey portrait painting since his day, we shall see that he has exercised more influence than any other artist who has ever lived. It may be said that Titian, for a couple of centuries after his death, was the idol almost exclusively worshipped, and that during the last fifty years Velazquez and Rembrandt have been the ideals painters have dangled before the public and themselves. But both of these mighty masters have had their ups and downs. The genius of Rembrandt was certainly not appreciated until the end of the eighteenth century, and even then his stupendous powers were not recognised as they have been in our own day.
The worship of Velazquez is quite a modern institution, and it is not at all unlikely, in the opinion of well-informed critics, that if his influence, which has now reached a decadent stage, is not curtailed it will create as much havoc amongst modern portrait painters as the example of Constable has had upon certain phases of landscape painting.
It can never be laid to the charge of Van Dyck that any period of his art has exercised a permanently baneful influence. True, immediately after the Restoration, a school arose, headed by Sir Peter Lely and Sir Godfrey Kneller, who claimed to have followed the traditions of Van Dyck. It requires, however, but little comparison between even his later and slighter works and those of Lely, who was incomparably the greatest of the portrait painters working in England in the interval between Van Dyck and Hogarth, to see how far below Van Dyck's standard portrait painting had fallen, and how little of his method there was left in it.