The Portrait Gallery collection includes several works that illustrate the turbulent period of revolution and civil war in seventeenth-century Britain. These range from a large canvas documenting the trial and execution of King Charles I to an outstanding portrait by William Dobson of the young Prince of Wales, the future Charles II. However, this intimate study of two of the daughters of Charles I is arguably the most moving of all the Gallery’s portraits of the royal house of Stuart. As an image of childhood innocence, captured in a rapid sketch from life, it is very different from the grand, imposing royal portraits that established Van Dyck’s reputation in England and it contrasts sharply with the violence and conflict that would soon engulf this family.

Van Dyck was born in Antwerp and trained in the studio of Rubens where he came to be known as his ‘best assistant’. In 1621 he was briefly in the service of James I in England but left for Italy to improve his art. He travelled widely but used Genoa as his base, and his superb painting of the Lomellini family in the Scottish National Gallery is among the most celebrated and ambitious of his portraits of wealthy patrons in that city. In 1632 he was drawn back to London by Charles I, knighted and appointed ‘Principal Painter in Ordinary to their Majesties’. In a series of vast canvases for the various royal residences he applied his brilliant command of technique to creating images of royal power, splendour and authority.

Our study of the two princesses relates to a large painting of the five eldest children of Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria in the Royal Collection. With just a few masterful strokes of his brush, Van Dyck captures the soft features and unfocused gaze of the infant Princess Anne and the caring but equally vulnerable face of her older sister Princess Elizabeth. Van Dyck often made drawings for his larger canvases, but this is the only oil study of its kind that is known from his period in England. It is possible, therefore, that it was not, as we might assume, a study to help him compose the large group portrait but a separate work, a charming souvenir that was perhaps even intended as a gift for the queen or a member of court. 

The later inscriptions on the study correctly identify the older girl as Princess Elizabeth but confuse Princess Anne with her brother, Henry, Duke of Gloucester. In 1637, when this sketch was made, Anne was just a few months old, and she survived a mere three years before she died of tuberculosis, so it is possible that her appearance in the picture was simply forgotten. The life of her older sister Elizabeth was also cut short. After the outbreak of the Civil War she was held captive by the Roundheads and died in 1650 aged just fifteen. Like her sister, she also suffered from tuberculosis, but tradition has it that this gentle and sensitive child never fully recovered from the news of her father’s execution.

This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.