ANTHONY VAN DYCK (1599-1641)

This curious combination of two states printed partially on top of each other is a great rarity and an oddity in the history of printmaking. Van Dyck, not happy with the position and execution of the sitter's arm in the first state, burnished it out in the present second state. In the third state the arm was left unfinished but the sitter's name and artist's address were engraved in the text border below. In the fourth state the arm was completed by Gillis Hendricx.

In the present example, the plate - now in the fourth state - was selectively inked so that only the arm would print and then superimposed onto an existing impression of the second state, without the arm and before letters. The arm was thus added to an earlier state. This procedure was done with remarkable skill although upon close examination double-printing of some lines can be detected. It appears that this difficult process was repeated several times: New Hollstein records a total of seven impressions printed in this manner; the present example is the only one known to remain in private hands. The other examples are in Brussels, Cambridge, Chatsworth, London, Paris, Paris (Duthuit) and Vienna.

This phenomenon of superimposition of the two states, so difficult to detect, was first described by Osbert Barnard in an article in Print Collector's Quarterly in 1938 (Osbert H. Barnard, Van Dyck's Portrait of Jan de Wael, in: Print Collector's Quarterly, no. 25, 1938, p. 156-165).