Resumen de Van Dyck's Club
The writer discusses the “club” that Anthony van Dyck established in London. Every winter during an extended stay in the city from 1632, Van Dyck held weekly convivial meetings of artists and art lovers in his house. According to a number of sources, he entertained his guests generously by offering food and drink. He adapted this form of hospitality to his activity as a portrait painter, using conviviality as a strategy to mitigate the boredom of sitter fatigue that threatened a pleasing likeness. Like his dinners, his club's meetings were a manifestation of sociability that had ample precedent in Italy; in England, however, his arrangement would represent the first instance of sociability centered on artists. Moreover, the gathering together of artists and art lovers has its exact parallel in his Iconography series of portrait prints, which largely coincided with his stay in England.
