9 December
There are pigments linked with the place of production, such as Sienna Earth, or to where they were used, such as the Pompeian Red, or the Delft Blue. But Van Dyck is the only painter who has a pigment all to himself: the VanDyke brown.
Yet his paintings are not particularly dark, especially when compared with those of Rembrandt or even Caravaggio, his contemporaries. However, it is no coincidence that precisely in this period in a series of new pigments emerges the range of browns from yellow to ochre to brown to black.
For Cennino Cennini and Alberti, chiaroscuro meant lightening or darkening the shades of pure and bright pigments by adding white or black. But in the following period and in particular in the seventeenth century there was a search for more dramatic contrasts, dark preparations and reddish shades.
VanDycke Brown, a brownish grey, is considered an Earth colour only because it is taken from the soil: but it is not a mineral, it is an organic material derived from peat or lignite. The transparency of the pigment in oil makes it excellent for veiling and this is the use that Van Dyck made of it, as his teacher Rubens used to do.
However, van Dyck had earned a special place in the London court. On 9 December 1641, when at only 42 years old, Antoon van Dyck died in his home in Blackfriars and was buried, with full honours and in the presence of the court, in Saint Paul Cathedral in London.
He left an indelible memory and a crowd of followers. Thus, what in Flanders was known in the nineteenth century as the brown Rubens became in England the Bruno Van Dyck. The spread of Anglo-Saxon terminology did the rest.
