Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) was a Flemish Baroque painter who became the preeminent court portraitist of seventeenth-century Europe, celebrated above all for his images of King Charles I and the English aristocracy. A prodigy who was already running his own workshop as a teenager and collaborating with Peter Paul Rubens by nineteen, he brought to portraiture a revolutionary ease and intimacy — his sitters lean, gesture, and gaze with a naturalism that broke decisively from the stiff formality that had come before him. After years in Italy absorbing the color and atmosphere of Titian, he settled permanently in London in 1632, where Charles I knighted him and gave him virtually unlimited patronage. His influence on British portrait painting extended unbroken for more than a century and a half, shaping the work of Gainsborough, Reynolds, and generations of artists who followed.