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 he was frustrated by the work being entrusted to the native painters, Simon Vouet and Nicolas Poussin. In November 1641, broken in health and spirits, Van Dyck returned to London. On 1 Dec. his wife gave birth to a daughter at Blackfriars. On 4 Dec. Van Dyck made a fresh will. On the 9th, the same day that his daughter Justiniana was baptised, the great painter died in his house at Blackfriars, aged 42 years, eight months, and seventeen days. On the 11th he was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral, near the tomb of John of Gaunt, where a monument was erected to his memory; but both grave and monument were destroyed by the great fire in 1666. In his will he provides for his newly born daughter, and also for an illegitimate daughter, Maria Theresa, born at Antwerp apparently before he went to Italy. His sister Susanna was appointed guardian to the infant.

Van Dyck's widow married Sir Richard Pryse, bart., of Gogerddan in Wales, and died in 1645. Justiniana married, in 1653, when only twelve years old, Sir John Baptist Stepney, bart., of Pendergast, Pembrokeshire. She appears to have inherited her father's art of painting, and is known to have painted a picture of the ‘Crucifixion’ which excited some attention. In 1660 she and her husband were received into the Roman catholic church at Antwerp, where her three daughters afterwards became béguines, like their aunts. Her son, Sir Thomas Stepney, was the ancestor of Sir Arthur E. Cowell-Stepney, bart. (d. 1909). At the Restoration Lady Stepney claimed the renewal of her father's pension, and succeeded in her suit. Maria Theresa, the illegitimate daughter of Van Dyck, married, in 1641, the year of her father's death, Gabriel Essers Drossart van Bouchout of Antwerp, and her children assumed the name of Essers Van Dyck.

The whole course of painting in England was altered by the brilliant career and achievements of Van Dyck. He destroyed the somewhat hard and narrow traditions of portraiture which had obtained before, and established a principle by which nearly all his successors in England have been guided. His merits as an historical painter have received less recognition in England, and even at Antwerp and elsewhere on the continent they have been overshadowed by the overwhelming and colossal genius of Rubens. In many ways his sacred and mythological paintings are in strong contrast to his master's in their sober and refined key of colour, their freedom from violent or contorted action, and the delicate shrinking from the nude or the more fleshly aspect of his art. As a portrait-painter Van Dyck may lack the precision of Holbein or tender intimacy of Cornelius Janssen, the directness and amazing technical skill of Velazquez or Frans Hals, the mysterious pathos of Rembrandt; but in his own manner he reigns supreme, and his genius needs no interpreter. It is curious that in England, where his fame ranks so high, Van Dyck's works can be studied only with difficulty, since they are so widely dispersed. Windsor, Petworth, and The Grove (the seat of the Earl of Clarendon), all have several fine examples. Better opportunities are afforded by the superb collections at Antwerp, Paris, Madrid, Munich, Cassel, Vienna, and at St. Petersburg, where, in the Hermitage Gallery, is the series of full-lengths painted by Van Dyck for Philip, fourth baron Wharton [q. v.], the finest works of his latest years. The National Gallery possesses but five pictures of importance, and the National Portrait Gallery only one.

[Carpenter's Pictorial Notices of Van Dyck, 1844; Michiel's Rubens et l'Ecole d'Anvers; F. van den Branden's Geschiedenis der Antwerpsche Schilderschool; Guiffrey's Antoine Van Dyck et son Œuvre; Van Dyck by P. R. Head, 1879, and by Lionel Cust, 1900, 1903; Smith's Cat. Raisonné of the Works; Hymans's ‘Van Dyck’ in the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th ed.); Cunningham's ‘Van Dyck in England’ in the Builder, 1864; Woltmann and Woermann's Geschichte der Malerei; Menotti's ‘Van Dyck in Genoa’ in Archivio Storico dell' Arte, 1897; Néve's Notes sur quelques Portraits de la Galerie d'Arenberg; Catalogues of chief galleries in England and on the Continent; Cat. of the Van Dyck Exhibition, Grosvenor Gallery, 1887; De Piles's Lives of the Painters; Max Rooses' Rubens et son Œuvre; Wibiral's Iconographie d'Antoine Van Dyck; Rathgeber's Annalen der niederländischen Malerei, &c.; manuscript notes by the late Sir G. Scharf, K.C.B.; information kindly supplied by Mons. Henri Hymans of Brussels.] 

VANDYKE, PETER (fl. 1767), painter, born in Holland in 1729, came over to England at the invitation of Sir Joshua Reynolds to assist in painting draperies and similar work for him. He exhibited a few pictures at the Incorporated Society of Artists in 1762 and 1764, and six portraits at the Free Society of Artists in 1767. Subsequently he settled at Bristol and practised as a portrait-painter there. He painted for Joseph Cottle [q. v.], the publisher, portraits of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Southey, which are now in the National Portrait Gallery. The portrait of Coleridge was engraved. The date of his death has not been ascertained. It has been stated,