Edward Kay

Edward Kay presents a trio of portraits painted after the Flemish Baroque painter Antoon van Dyk (1599-1641).

Van Dyke’s ‘Charles the First in Three positions’ (1636) depicts the then monarch of England, Scotland and Ireland. Unusually for a portrait, the subject is at once seen in profile, face-on and in three-quarter profile. As such it is said to have been inspired by the Venetian painter, Lorenzo Lotto (c.1480-1556) and his ‘Triple Portrait of a Goldsmith’ (1530) which Charles owned. In turn van Dyke’s portrait of Charles influenced Philip de Champaigne’s ‘Triple Portrait of Cardinal de Richelieu’ (c.1642).

Van Dyke’s portrait was commissioned to assist the architect and sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) in producing a marble bust of the King. This bust was to be a component in political negotiations over Charles’ proposed marriage to Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henry IV, the French King. Upon receiving the painting Bernini is said to have exclaimed that it was ‘the portrait of a doomed man’. Charles was subsequently deposed and decapitated in 1649 whilst Bernini’s bust was destroyed in a fire at the Palace of Whitehall in 1698.

Whilst Kay admires the work of van Dyke and recognises the significance of Charles I both politically and as a patron of the arts, his choice of subject is also essentially arbitrary. Previous paintings have, for example, featured anthropomorphised pickles; surgically altered, topless models and the instigator of the Italian Renaissance, poet, Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374). Kay is primarily concerned with the practice of painting itself and the process of producing images, what they specifically represent being of lesser importance. Produced using airbrushed acrylic on canvas these works eschew the traditional brush, oil paint and naturalistic colours of van Dyke in an art historical interpolation that explores the dichotomies and dilemmas of contemporary painting.