The Art Gallery at the Athenaeum contains one of America’s unique collections of 19th century American paintings. Each week we will feature a different work on this page. We hope educators will use this link as a tool to enrich their art curriculum. Vermonters and other citizens throughout the nation can now visit our gallery in this new, intimate, and informative way.
The text describing each painting was written by Mark D. Mitchell, Assistant Curator of Nineteenth-Century Art at the National Academy Museum. The digital images were prepared by Robert Jenks of Jenks Studio of Photography in St. Johnsbury, VT.
Please note that the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum prohibits the use of images from its collection in public exhibition, broadcast, electronic reproduction or publication in any form without prior written permission from the institution. If you would like to reproduce any of the Art Gallery images in any form, contact Irwin Gelber at 748-8291, extension 307.
After Anthony van Dyke (1599-1641), Flemish
The Children of Charles I, undated copy
OIL ON CANVAS,62 x 60 inches
Gift of Horace Fairbanks
Among the reproductions of celebrated masterworks in the Athenaeum's collection, none has the scale of the copy after Anthony van Dyke's Children of Charles I. The work is virtually identical in size to the original painting, effectively conveying the original's grandiosity. The work is celebrated in modern art history for its complex design, nuanced sensitivity to color, and balance of the competing priorities of familial intimacy and official portrait.
Van Dyke's painting (now in the collection of the Galleria Sabauda in Turin, Italy) was created in 1635 as a gift to the Queen of England's sister, Duchess Christina of Savoy, and portrays the Queen's three eldest children, Charles, Mary, and James. The King, Charles I, was reportedly angered by the painting because his children, including his immediate heir, are shown in infants' clothing, rather than more adult costume. When van Dyke revisited the subject for another commission the following year, he made certain that the children's costumes and demeanors were perceptibly older, at the expense of accuracy.