Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 242

Will the Detroit Institute of Arts be forced to sell its treasures?

One of the US's great art museums, housing works by Diego Rivera, Cezanne and Whistler, threatened by city's bankruptcy

"Support the DIA", pleads the website of the Detroit Institute of Arts. It might seem like the kind of message every museum puts out, inviting people to become friends or make donations – but under the civilised tone is a note of panic.

The DIA is the first of the US's great museums ever to face the break-up of its collection for financial reasons. With Detroit officially bankrupt, creditors are pressurising the city to sell off some of the museum's first-rate art. The fatal coincidence of a broke city and a rampaging art market makes this temptation very real. Can Detroit's art museum survive?

This is an extraordinary image of the US in decline. There are many amazing things that strike visitors to the country, but the superb museums that exist across this vast nation are among its glories. These museums are monuments to the rise of the US to the forefront of global economies between 1880 and 1960. Palaces of culture from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the Menil Collection in Houston bear witness to the largesse of triumphant capitalists in an age of robber barons, oil wells and skyscraper ambition.

The Detroit Institute of Arts is a classic example. In its expansive Rivera Court is a mural by Diego Rivera – the Marxist painter who, paradoxically, was in demand to decorate citadels of American wealth in the 1930s. Rivera's mural is a homage to the workers in Detroit's motor industry. The success of that industry loaded Detroit's art museum with riches, just as the industry's demise now threatens it.

So what are the artistic riches Detroit's creditors are salivating over? This museum's outstanding collection includes one of the most celebrated American paintings, Cotopaxi (1862) by Frederic Church. It also boasts Van Gogh's Portrait of Postman Roulin (1888), The Three Skulls (c1900) by Cezanne and Whistler's Nocturne in Blue and Gold – The Falling Rocket (1875).

Just to name these paintings is to realise that the DIA really is one of the US's great art galleries. Will it now be broken up by the very market forces that created it in the first place?

I can't helping thinking this has the seed of a great American novel about money, culture and tragedy. Let's hope it has a happy ending and that American civilization will triumph over American market savagery.

MuseumsArtDetroit bankruptcyUnited StatesMichiganDetroitJonathan Jones
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Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper? Ridiculous! He was actually Dracula

Crime novelist Patricia Cornwell has claimed Sickert was the killer – but is it fair to posthumously punish an artist for capturing sex and sleaze in the city?

Poor Sickert. This imaginative British artist who captured a low-life late Victorian world of music halls and shadowy interiors is one of the most compelling artists in the new Tate Britain. His painting Minnie Cunningham at the Old Bedford (1892), with its flare of a red dress in the flickering theatre lights, is, for instance, a work of character, sensuality and modernist edge – at his best, Sickert strives to be an English Degas.

But while Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec were painting dancers and prostitutes in Paris, Sickert had the misfortune to cast his daring eye on London. There, he braved Victorian censure to paint nudes as well as nightlife scenes. His reward, in the 21st century, is to be accused of being Jack the Ripper.

Crime novelist Patricia Cornwell has bought no fewer than 32 of Sickert's paintings in her quest to prove he was the serial killer who terrorised late 19th-century Whitechapel. Cornwell claims she now has crucial evidence, including watermarks on letters, that puts Sickert in the frame as London's most notorious murderer. She's not the first Ripperologist to take an interest in him: Sickert also appears in Alan Moore's graphic novel about the case, From Hell. But no one else has bought up a load of his paintings, taking them out of the public eye to use as "scientific" evidence, or spent more than a decade trying to put him, posthumously, in the noose.

A noose it is, for Cornwell's accusation burns out Sickert's real achievements and irradiates him as an artist. Here is a bold painter who was not afraid to put sex and sleaze into his art at a time when most British artists were timid and repressed. He dares the radical urban danger that artists in Paris were so alive to. Why does that make him a likely serial killer? Ripperologists are the last Victorian prudes, associating sex and evil.

Who knows, perhaps he was Dracula, that other renowned Victorian monster. After all, Dracula enters modern culture in a novel published in Sickert's London when this harsh, demonic painter was at work. I have researched this using the latest technology, and when you look closely at Sickert's painting of Minnie Cunningham, she has two small puncture marks on her throat. As for her name, "Minnie" is clearly a reference to Mina Harker in Stoker's Dracula – which is therefore a veiled portrait of Sickert and his dark side. The red dress Sickert's Minnie Cunningham wears is a confession of the blood he needs to stay alive.

Case closed: Walter Sickert was Dracula.

Or perhaps he was just a powerful painter whose art addresses the same themes of sex and city life that have turned the crimes of a nameless murderer into a modern myth.

Tate BritainArtPatricia CornwellCrime fictionJonathan Jones
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Why the Turner prize turns me off

Laure Prouvost is a worthy winner. But this prize has lost its ability to outrage and risks leaving the public disengaged

Congratulations to Laure Prouvost on winning the 2013 Turner prize in Derry. It is always good when the award goes to an "outsider" as this helps lesser-known talent to get its due and reveals the true richness of the art scene beyond the usual media names.

That said – this feels like one of the Turner's off years, and I hope it does not herald a series of bizarre shortlists and ever-more eccentric choices of locale.

Before anyone leaps on the last part of that sentence, let me say the most important, and sad, cultural event of 2013 was the death of Ireland's great poet Seamus Heaney. The loss of Heaney leaves the UK bereft – and showed why Derry really is a culture capital.

Staging the Turner prize there seems irrelevant to that – and perhaps even a bit patronising, as in, partake of some metropolitan culture. At the same time, it has robbed the prize of its natural setting at Tate Britain, where the history of the museum sets off the sensations and shocks of contemporary art so well.

Then again, those shocks … in recent years, the Turner has lost its ability to outrage anyone. This is simply because conceptual art has become widely accepted and even admired in Britain. In the early 1990s it was seen by many as offensive and outrageous, the Turner its monstrous cheerleader. Now that conceptual art is as British as Wensleydale, the Turner can't expect to send anyone into convulsions.

Recent instalments have wisely not attempted to shock anyone and gone instead for quiet, serious examinations of the state of the art. This has given the prize a new, mature role.

But this year's shortlist was a dog's dinner of artists with a hyperbolic splashing of big themes like "interaction". It did not have the feeling of a hard-fought, intensely argued list – and the exhibition, perhaps driven to draw glances from the metropolitan media, resorted to what seemed like cheap attempts to revive the shocks of yesteryear.

The result was an uncharismatic and confusing Turner prize that was hard to care about. Prouvost's win is a last-minute surprise that will leave the wider public still more baffled and disengaged.

Turner prizeLaure ProuvostArtAwards and prizesTate BritainTurner prize 2013Jonathan Jones
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What was on Obama's mind as he sat on the Rosa Parks bus?

The US president was accused of narcissism when he posted this photograph on Twitter to mark the 58th anniversary of Parks's protest. But was he meditating on her example – and, perhaps, on enduring racial inequalities in the US?

President Barack Obama sits with his eyes on history. He's looking back in time, and perhaps he wishes things could be as clear now as they were then.

There was no ambiguity about what was at stake on 1 December 1955. Rosa Parks was riding the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, when she was told to give up her seat to make room for a white man. She refused and, under the American south's notorious "Jim Crow" laws, she was immediately arrested. The campaign that grew out of her defiance made a leader of Martin Luther King, a household name of Rosa Parks and ended racial segregation on buses. It is widely seen as the start of the civil rights movement's transformation of the US.

That's what Obama seems to be remembering as he sits on the same bus Rosa Parks boarded, now a treasure of the Henry Ford Museum near Detroit. Yet in modern America nothing is sacred. No sooner had he posted this photograph on Twitter to mark the 58th anniversary of Parks's protest than commentators were accusing him of "narcissism" for identifying with her courage.

That criticism is blatantly spurious. He does not look in the photograph as if he is claiming to be a reincarnation of Parks – rather as if he is meditating on her example. Meanwhile, the Republican party was mocked for a tweet praising Parks for her "role in ending racism", as if America today were an egalitarian utopia.

And perhaps this is what's on the president's mind as he sits there. Clearly, the fact that an African-American president can sit on that bus is in many ways the fulfillment of the "dream" the civil rights movement dared to believe in. Yet across America, cities are still divided, not by law but economics, into black and white districts. Massive racial inequalities haunt that battered old bus. Obama's presidency, like the success of other individuals, appears not to change the overall texture of highly visible injustice that still scars a nation built partly on slavery. The president spoke out after Trayvon Martin was shot dead but this did not stop a Florida jury acquitting the man who killed this unarmed black teenager.

And then there's the trivialistation of modern American politics, drained of meaning by trash TV and reduced to gossip by social media. What Obama might be thinking, is that back in 1955 you could change the world by boarding a bus. In 2013, it seems hard to change anything even when your seat is in the Oval Office.

Race issuesUnited StatesUS politicsBarack ObamaJonathan Jones
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Zaha Hadid's vagina stadium, penis factories and Vincent van Coffee – the week in art

The architect may have to scale back the vulvic bulge she's created in Qatar, the Chapman brothers reveal all and one barista gets arty – in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Turner and the Sea
Swirling and swelling, the great untamed ocean has never had a more acute portraitist than JMW Turner. Greenwich was home to veterans of Nelson's navy in the days when this Londoner was lashing himself to masts to create majestic perceptions of nautical mayhem. Now he returns here to take visitors back in time to the days when Britain ruled the waves, in art as well as war.
• National Maritime Museum, Greenwich SE10 until 21 April

Other exhibitions this week

The Scottish Colourists Series: JD Fergusson
The fierce expressive Fauves-tinged paintings of Fergusson make him a powerful follower of the 20th century avant garde.
• Modern Two (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art), Edinburgh EH4 from 7 December until 15 June

Christmas Open Exhibition
Artists of Orkney exhibit their latest work at the excellent Pier Arts Centre gallery, in one of Britain's northernmost towns.
• Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney KW16 until 24 December

Past the Future
This exhibition, put together by Paul Noble, inaugurates Tate Britain's new Open Archive gallery.
• Tate Britain, London SW1P until 14 April

Perfect Timing: The Mostyn Tompian Clock
Are clocks art? Yes, when they are as beautiful, intricate and rare as this rare specimen, made to mark the coronation of King William III in 1689.
• British Museum, London WC1B until 2 February

Masterpiece of the week

Red-figured cup, attributed to the Kodros Painter
At the heart of this powerful painting on a wide flat ceramic cup is a bold picture of Theseus killing the Minotaur. It's one of the great images of the minotaur – half-man, half-bull and all murderer – that stalked its victims in a labyrinth. Picasso himself did not capture this myth better than the Kodros painter does in this masterpiece from classical Athens.
• British Museum, London WC1B

Image of the weekWhat we learned this week

That Zaha Hadid is coming under fire because her stadium for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar looks too much like a vagina

Why Damien Hirst has been accused of plagiarism for turning Rihanna into Medusa

That there's a global rise in fine art groupies

What penis factories, Happy Shopper and Meryl Streep have in common

Why the Chapman brothers are still as controversial as ever

That one barista is really putting the art into coffee

That the Tetley brewery in Leeds has reopened as an art gallery

Which artists most inspire Mike Leigh, Christopher Nolan and Ken Loach

How to make fine china using a hammer

And finally …

Follow us on Twitter

There's still time to share your art about chairs before our new theme – celebrations – launches on Monday

ArtDesignPaintingSculptureJMW TurnerZaha HadidArchitectureJake and Dinos ChapmanScotlandJonathan Jones
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Only here for Vermeer: the rise of fine art groupies

Gangs of Vermeer fans are flocking to the US's east coast, where 40% of all his work is currently on display. I salute them

Vermeer, that genius of quiet intensity, has some very intense fans. According to the New York Times, superfans are flocking to America's eastern seaboard, where an exhibition at the Frick, added to his excellent presence in permanent collections in Washington and New York and a loan at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, means that nearly 40% of his known works can currently be seen in the same region.

The Times reports that Vermeer superfans, whom it compares to Wagner enthusiasts, are travelling to America specifically to see this constellation of his works. And why wouldn't they?

Money apart, it's well worth dedicating yourself to a great artist such as Vermeer. Why should this be thought unusual? People lavish time, funds and effort on cultural activities that are far less rewarding, from football to concerts by ageing rock stars. Vermeer is a profoundly rich and complex artist whose works mirror the living world. He has an enigma at his heart and there are only a limited number of paintings by him extant – so you can strive to see them all.

I may even have done so. I know I've seen his paintings in New York, Washington, the Hague, Amsterdam, Vienna, Paris and London. That can't leave too many I have not seen. And I wouldn't even say I was a Vermeer superfan. What I am is a Leonardo da Vinci nut. At the height of my obsession with him, I travelled to New York and Paris to see exhibitions of his drawings, repeatedly took the train to France just to see his paintings in the Louvre, talked my way into the Royal Library at Windsor to go through boxes of his notes, and made pilgrimage upon pilgrimage to Florence.

The lovely thing about Leonardo is that you don't have to spend this much time and money to find him rewarding. His art reproduces easily and his notebooks can be read anywhere in paperback. After blowing all my money on the travels described above, I just sat down with some picture books and found Leonardo even more mesmerising.

But I think it is worth being a slave to art. Some artists just get their hooks in you and ask you to find out more about them. You feel utterly compelled to track down their masterpieces – reproductions will not do.

As well as doting on Leonardo, I confess to being a Michelangelo and Caravaggio groupie. I have made it my business to see the almost complete works of Michelangelo – his Madonna in Bruges is the only one of his sculptures I have still not seen face to face – and I have taken a trip in search of every painting by Caravaggio.

It doesn't pass, this addiction. I've seen all of Caravaggio's paintings in Italy but last summer, in Rome, it suddenly hit me that I had to see his picture of St Peter in Santa Maria del Popolo, immediately, and I dragged my family across the city, way off course, in the hot afternoon. We'd already seen three Caravaggios that day – why did I need another? I just did.

Great art is deeply compelling. It makes groupies of us if we let it. And it is truly worth the effort, so why not? I don't think the people making a pilgrimage to the Frick's Vermeer exhibition are eccentrics. I think they are true art lovers.

Johannes VermeerLeonardo da VinciMichelangelo Merisi da CaravaggioExhibitionsArtPaintingUnited StatesNew YorkJonathan Jones
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Damien Hirst, Rihanna and Medusa: the latest plagiarism row

Jim Starr claims Hirst's GQ shoot featuring a snake-haired Rihanna is ripping him off, but artists have been depicting Medusa for millennia – often far better than either of them

The artist Jim Starr has accused Damien Hirst of plagiarism. Hirst has put a picture of Rihanna as the snaked-headed monster Medusa on the cover of GQ. Hey, wait a minute, says Starr – I was the first to portray sexy snake-haired women.

It's always fun to take a pop at Hirst, but hang on. Haven't I seen images of Medusa before that far outdate Hirst and Starr? I suspect plagiarism claims are redundant when artists have been depicting something for more than 2,500 years.

Medusa was, in ancient Greek myth, one of the Gorgons, three monstrous sisters with magical powers. She was so malevolent that just looking at her turned people to stone. How can you kill such a being? The Greek hero Perseus used a shiny shield as a mirror so he only saw a reflection as he sliced off her serpent-swathed head and stuffed it in a sack. Later, at his wedding, he fought off a violent mob by unveiling the head and turning his enemies to stone.

This is the moment Luca Giordano chose to show in the 1680s in a baroque painting whose fascination lies in the way flesh turns to stone before our eyes. As he holds forth the head of Medusa at the heart of this spectacular picture in London's National Gallery, Perseus averts his gaze.

Artists had already been imagining Medusa for millennia when this powerful scene was painted. An archaic-period Greek bowl in the British Museum, from 600BC or earlier, has an image of Medusa glaring outwards, as if about to turn you to stone: it must have been quite a talking point when the bowl was emptied of olives at a banquet, only to reveal this hideous face.

Medusa was popular right through the ancient Greek world, appearing on everything from temples to pots. Yet the most potent images of her were to be painted and sculpted in the 17th century, when this bizarre being became an icon of baroque art.

For that we probably have to thank Caravaggio, who created an unforgettable "portrait" of Medusa on a painted shield. Today it's in the Uffizi. Caravaggio's Medusa is one of the most incisive images of myth ever created. This is because it takes a legend and makes it all too real – this is a viscerally, uncannily alive Medusa.

In the wake of Caravaggio, great artists of the 17th century all wanted to have a pop at making Medusa real. Bernini made her look like an ordinary woman who happens to have snakes for hair. Rubens depicted her severed head on the ground, a mass of reptilian horror.

So the charge against Hirst is not plagiarism – it is sheer artistic ordinariness. Neither he nor Starr have added anything original to the image of Medusa. The GQ cover is as insipid as some late Victorian mythic erotica. Compared with the great Medusas of the classical and baroque ages, Rihanna with snaky hair is just plain dull.

It goes to show that Caravaggio could take Hirst in a fight, any day.

Damien HirstPhotographySculptureArtRihannaGreeceEuropeMagazinesNewspapers & magazinesJonathan Jones
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Why we see Hitler's face on a puppy | Jonathan Jones

There is a psychological phenomenon behind our tendency to see images in arbitrary shapes

I can't see it. Well I mean, I can see it because a headline told me to look for the resemblance – "Heel Hitler!" – but Patch the puppy barely looks like the Führer, if I am honest. That hasn't stopped his cute puppy face appearing all over the place next to pictures of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), the Nazi dictator responsible for the organised murder of 6 million Jews, not to mention carrying the lion's share of blame for 72 million deaths in the second world war as a whole.

One thing to say is that Hitler might – for once – have enjoyed the joke. He did love dogs. Just before killing himself as the Russians approached his bunker in Berlin, he tenderly put down his beloved dog, Blondi. Needless to say Hitler's hapless dog looked nothing like him.

There is a psychological phenomenon behind our tendency to see images in arbitrary shapes – a modern term for this is apophenia, but it was first diagnosed by Leonardo da Vinci more than five centuries ago. "If you look at a mottled or stained wall," said Leonardo, "you may start to see landscapes, battles and strange faces." Children see faces and monsters easily in the pattern of a curtain or the shape of a cloud. Adults, more cut off from our dreams, tend to need a stronger trigger.

We might ask why Hitler is so often the "strange face" modern adults see. The Hitler puppy follows on from a house in Swansea that looked like the Führer. Why Hitler?

To answer this we need to ask why Hitler looked the way he did. Toothbrush moustaches and side partings were quite popular in the early 20th century, but Hitler managed to twist this into a globally recognised icon, as recognisable as a cartoon character. He came to power in 1933 in the age of Mickey Mouse, when cartoonists were starting to discover the power of simple graphic signs in a mass media age. Mickey's ears; Hitler's moustache.

Yet the source of Hitler's look was more specific – the most famous toothbrush moustache before his belonged to Charlie Chaplin. The hugely popular – and leftwing – silent comic had a little moustache that signified his working class identification with the common man. Hitler adopted the same demotic facial hair, to appeal to the popular culture appreciation of Chaplin. In his film The Great Dictator, the radical Chaplin got revenge by using this likeness to satirise Hitler. In another 1930s film, Duck Soup, a large pot falls on Groucho Marx, trapping his head. The other Marx brothers simply draw his trademark face – glasses, eyebrows, moustache – on the vase. This crude drawing is an effective substitute for Groucho's face, whose moustache was drawn on anyway.

What all these makers of modern culture recognised was that simple signs can substitute for the nuances of individuality to define a Mickey, a Charlie, a Groucho, a Hitler. And this brings us back to that curious human tendency to see faces and other shapes where they do not really exist. You may see a face in a puppy or a house but it is not likely to be very subtle. No one is likely to see Rembrandt's Kenwood self portrait hidden in a funny shaped hedge.

Instead, we see caricatures of faces – crude agglomerations of simple marks. It was part of Hitler's dark mastery of modern communication that he reduced his face to such a stereotype. He wrote the jokes himself, in some horrible sense, setting the script for Basil Fawlty to put his finger under his nose and for people to see a puppy as his lookalike.

In the early 20th century Picasso took apart faces in cubist portraits that are themselves psychological tricks. Can you see a face in Picasso's Portrait of Kahnweiler? The bits that are recognisable, such as wavy hair and an ear, are just as simple and cartoonish as the human face we see in a house or a puppy. We think we remember faces, but in fact we remember caricatures. The essence of perception may be cruder than we think.

Hitler was happy to aim low. A moustache, a parting, a stare. His face in a puppy? He must be laughing in hell.

Adolf HitlerPhotographyAnimalsPetsJonathan Jones
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Dead wrong: the battle over Richard III's bones makes peasants of us all

The squabble over these regal relics does nothing to serve history – it's just medieval myth-making, pure and simple

If the secret plan of the Richard III Society was to return Britain to the middle ages, the job is done. As a court steps in to decide whether the (very) deceased monarch's remains should rest in Leicester Cathedral or York Minster, one can only conclude that we "modern" British possess all the rationality, common sense and enlightenment of superstitious medieval peasants.

The row over Richard's bones is exactly like a dispute between two medieval cathedrals over the right to some relic of the True Cross. All over Europe, cathedrals were built between 1000 and 1500 AD to house relics ranging from saint's fingers to the burial shroud of Jesus. York and Leicester are in this sense acting true to form – they both want a famous relic. But how does that help anyone to understand history?

The discovery of Richard III's skeleton under a car park was a fascinating dig that seemed to open a window on the past. But it has turned out to be a false window. Any wider insight this discovery might have brought about medieval life or our relationship with history has been swallowed up in a stupid tide of sentimentality.

It all has to do with putting a face on the past. A portrait bust of Richard III was created on the basis of his exhumed skull, and some claimed to be moved to tears by it. Suddenly, because his face was in the papers, Richard was One of Us.

There's no rational basis to this. Nothing has been proved about his guilt or innocence. Richard III was a murderous tyrant according to Thomas More. It suited the Tudor age to see him that way, but the discovery of his bones makes absolutely no difference to working out what he really did and did not do. Did Richard order the deaths of the princes in the tower? Very plausible, if unproven. There's no reason to see him as a saint, just because we can put a face to his skull.

I am all for the contemplation of portraits as images from other times. It's moving to look at the painted face of Artemidorus on his mummy in the British Museum. But the visualisation of Richard shows the danger of putting images ahead of words. Because this medieval man has been given a face, and the illusion of intimacy that brings, his PR people have been able to ride roughshod over history.

The study of history is not, in the end, visual. It is wordy. You have to read books – and more than one. Many interpretations of many events make up the dense fabric of historical thought. Today's popular history risks offering a bite-sized intellectual snack if it encourages us ro read just one paperback or watch one TV show. That's just history-lite.

But when it comes to fetishising a face and some bones, as has happened with Richard III, we're not even talking history – we're talking myth. You can learn more about the middle ages by watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail than you can by weeping over Richard III.

Bring out your dead.

ArtRichard IIIMonarchyJonathan Jones
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Why Anthony van Dyck was Britain's first art star

The National Portrait Gallery is trying to drum up millions to buy a Van Dyck self-portrait. So why is this Belgian artist so important to British art history?

£12.5m for a self-portrait by Anthony van Dyck? That's what the National Portrait Gallery and the Art Fund are trying to raise in an appeal launched today. Is it worth it?

Absolutely. I think this is one of the most worthwhile campaigns in years to "save" a work of art for the nation. Van Dyck's Self-Portrait would make a spectacular addition to the National Portrait Gallery. Quite frankly, it could make the place. It would give a gallery stuffed with pictures of primarily historical interest a true artistic masterpiece, by the man from Antwerp who gave birth to British art.

Van Dyck was fascinated by the English face. His paintings are full of pale faces, with quirky physiognomies and flaccid skin – the faces of the English upper class in the reign of Charles I. You can see how intrigued he was by this northern island just by looking at his portrait of the art collector George Gage doing business in Italy. Van Dyck shows this elegant art lover as a quintessential Englishman abroad, his long white hands and face looking raw and even sickly in the light of Rome.

Charles I ruled over an art-loving court and Van Dyck, a painter who could and did work all over Europe, came to Britain to get paid for portraits. His images of Stuart ladies and gentlemen have immense panache and cavalier style. They are at once real and down to earth – those pasty faces – yet magnificent in their silken garments and rich settings.

When British art took off in the 18th century, it was Van Dyck that artists like Gainsborough looked back to as the father of British painting – Gainsborough's painting The Blue Boy is his tribute to his art hero.

The painting the National Portrait Gallery wants to buy is the last known self-portrait by Van Dyck. He was very conscious of his talent – this portrait shows it. He stands sideways to the mirror he is looking at while he paints, and turns his head lightly towards it in a nonchalant, aristocratic pose.

Yet his world was falling apart. This was painted in 1640 to 1641 as Britain descended into a civil war that would leave many of Van Dyck's subjects and patrons, including Charles I, dead.

Meanwhile, Van Dyck himself had died by December 1641. The king said – as praise – that he spent all his money living "more like a prince than a painter".

Van Dyck was Britain's first art star. For once, a campaign to save a painting is not just hype. This gifted Flemish student of the English face belongs in this country, at the National Portrait Gallery, among all those people whose bad skin and bad teeth and cockeyed smiles he had such a good eye for.

Van DyckNational Portrait GalleryArtPaintingThe art marketJonathan Jones
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