Ten years ago, the Royal Academy celebrated the fourth centenary of Van Dyck’s birth with an exhibition that in 105 examples covered every aspect of his working life as a painter. That distillation from a thousand pictures, mostly portraits, that range from the pure authority of his own hand to that of the most crass assistant in his studio making copies simultaneously with the original gave us the whole life and the whole man, from his brilliant promise as the best pupil Rubens ever had, to his succession as that great inventor’s rival under the patronage of Italian aristocrats, on to his appointment in July 1632 to King Charles I and Henrietta Maria as their "principal’s Paynter in ordinary" until his death in Blackfriars in December 1641, three months short of his 43rd birthday. It was an exhibition that proved "perhaps, that Van Dyck was a far better painter than we grudgingly allow".