By the age of twenty-two, Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641) had produced more than 160 paintings, many of them ambitious compositions of remarkable quality.

This book presents the work created during the eight years between 1613, when he was just fourteen, to his departure for Italy from Antwerp in October 1621. Were the paintings he created during these years his only legacy, he would still be recognized as one of the greatest artists of the seventeenth century.

Van Dycks precocious talents are brilliantly demonstrated in the many important works reproduced here, among them such strikingly original masterpieces as The Taking of Christ and Saint Jerome in the Desert. Others - Christ's Entry into Jerusalem and The Lamentation, for example – reveal Van Dyck at his most experimental, in search of new ways of increasing the visual impact of his compositions. Van Dyck was also one of the first painters to rise to the challenge of Rubens' omnipresent influence, evident in works such as The Crowning with Thorns