The seventh child of Frans van Dyck, a wealthy silk merchant in Antwerp, Anthony painted from an early age.

Van Dyck worked in London for some months in 1621, then returned to Flanders for a brief time, before travelling to Italy, where he stayed until 1627, mostly in Genoa.

With the exception of Holbein, van Dyck and his contemporary Diego Velázquez were the first painters of pre-eminent talent to work mainly as court portraitists, revolutionising the genre.

He also painted mythological, allegorical and biblical subjects, including altarpieces, displayed outstanding facility as a draughtsman, and was an important innovator in watercolour and etching.

The elder brother of his grandfather was also admitted as master painter in the Guild and had studied with Geert Ghendrick.,[6] He had later become a successful merchant in silk and small writing articles.

He had bought the birth house of Anthony called Den Berendans (The Bear Dance) on the Grote Markt in Antwerp (Main Square) in 1579.

It was during the period van Dyck may have started painting the series of panels of Christ and the Apostles in bust-length, although it is also possible that this only happened after his first return from Italy in 1620–21.

[9] It was in London in the collection of the Earl of Arundel that he first saw the work of Titian, whose use of colour and subtle modeling of form would prove transformational, offering a new stylistic language that would enrich the compositional lessons learned from Rubens.

He was already presenting himself as a figure of consequence, annoying the rather bohemian Northern artist's colony in Rome, says Giovan Pietro Bellori, by appearing with "the pomp of Zeuxis ... his behaviour was that of a nobleman rather than an ordinary person, and he shone in rich garments.

Since he was accustomed in the circle of Rubens to noblemen, and being naturally of elevated mind, and anxious to make himself distinguished, he therefore wore—as well as silks—a hat with feathers and brooches, gold chains across his chest, and was accompanied by servants.

His depictions of a young woman with flowing blonde hair wearing a Franciscan cowl and reaching down toward the city of Palermo in its peril, became the standard iconography of the saint from that time onward and was extremely influential for Italian Baroque painters, from Luca Giordano to Pietro Novelli.

Van Dyck's series of St Rosalia paintings have been studied by Gauvin Alexander Bailey and Xavier F. Salomon, both of whom curated or co-curated exhibitions devoted to the theme of Italian art and the plague.

[13][14][15] In 2020, the New York Times published an article about the Metropolitan Museum of Art's painting of Saint Rosalia by Van Dyck in the context of the COVID-19 virus.

In 1628, he bought the fabulous collection that the Duke of Mantua was forced to sell, and he had been trying since his accession in 1625 to bring leading foreign painters to England.

He sent some of his own works, including a self-portrait (1623) with Endymion Porter, one of Charles's agents, his Rinaldo and Armida (1629), and a religious picture for Queen Henrietta Maria.

[20] His Blackfriars studio was frequently visited by the King and Queen (later a special causeway was built to ease their access), who hardly sat for another painter while van Dyck lived.

Altogether van Dyck has been estimated to have painted forty portraits of King Charles himself, as well as about thirty of the Queen, nine of the Earl of Strafford, and multiple ones of other courtiers.

[20] In England he developed a version of his style which combined a relaxed elegance and ease with an understated authority in his subjects which was to dominate English portrait-painting to the end of the 18th century.

[22] Although his portraits have created the classic idea of "Cavalier" style and dress, in fact a majority of his most important patrons in the nobility, such as Lord Wharton and the Earls of Bedford, Northumberland and Pembroke, took the Parliamentarian side in the English Civil War that broke out soon after his death.

[26] A letter dated 13 August 1641, from Lady Roxburghe in England to a correspondent in The Hague, reported that van Dyck was recuperating from a long illness.

Van Dyck tried to persuade Charles to commission large-scale series on the history of the Order of the Garter for the Banqueting House, Whitehall, for which Rubens had earlier completed the large ceiling paintings (sending them from Antwerp).

In his visits to Paris in his last years, van Dyck attempted to obtain the commission to paint the Grande Gallerie of the Louvre without success.

When Sophia of Hanover first met Queen Henrietta Maria (who was in exile in Holland) in 1641, she wrote: "Van Dyck's handsome portraits had given me so fine an idea of the beauty of all English ladies, that I was surprised to find that the Queen, who looked so fine in painting, was a small woman raised up on her chair, with long skinny arms and teeth like defence works projecting from her mouth..."[9] Some critics have blamed van Dyck for diverting a nascent, tougher English portrait tradition—of painters such as William Dobson, Robert Walker and Isaac Fuller—into what certainly became elegant blandness in the hands of many of van Dyck's successors, like Lely or Kneller.

[9] The conventional view has always been more favourable: "When Van Dyck came hither he brought Face-Painting to us; ever since which time ... England has excel'd all the World in that great Branch of the Art" (Jonathan Richardson: An Essay on the Theory of Painting, 1715, 41).

Several of the most detailed are of Rye, a port for ships to the Continent, suggesting that van Dyck did them casually whilst waiting for wind or tide to improve.

[30] Probably during his period in Antwerp after his return from Italy, van Dyck began his Iconographie, which became a very large series of prints with half-length portraits of eminent contemporaries.

[46] In 2008, Patrimonio Nacional of Spain recovered a Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian and returned it to El Escorial, two centuries after its removal and, subsequently, The Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando has revealed as its own a long-stored painting, added to another, The Virgin with the Child with the repentant sinners,[47] in addition the institution has an original sketch.

In addition, in December 2017, a Virgin with Child, which is kept in The Cerralbo Museum and was previously considered the work of Mateo Cerezo, was revealed as the painter's original after an exhaustive study and restoration project.

[48] Finally, The Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia owns an Equestrian Portrait of Don Francisco de Moncada (currently undergoing restoration, April 2020).

[50] In 2016 the Frick Collection in New York had an exhibition "Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture", the first major survey of the artist's work in the United States in over two decades.