Anthony van Dyck

This drawing is a study for a figure in Anthony van Dyck’s large painting The Taking of Christ. The servant Malchus is depicted in a moment of struggle, just before the apostle Peter cuts off his ear with a sword. Van Dyck confidently outlined the contours of the dramatically foreshortened figure with fluid, unbroken marks. For the shading, he used tightly packed and regular parallel hatching, which he softly blended in the lighter areas. Spare in its use of materials, the study achieves a remarkable effect of movement.

This drawing is a compositional study for a painting depicting the betrayal of Christ that the artist presented to his teacher, Peter Paul Rubens. The subject of the sketch is Malchus, servant to the high priest of Jerusalem. According to the Gospel of John, Peter severed Malchus’s ear with a sword during Christ’s capture in the Garden of Gethsemane. Van Dyck depicted Malchus’s struggle with Peter, whose hand is visible at left grasping Malchus’s clothing. Van Dyck’s strong direction of line, most obvious beneath the figure, reinforces Malchus’s violent gesture.

Van Dyck created this sketch for the figure of Malchus in his painting Betrayal of Christ, now in the Prado Museum, Madrid, and reproduced below. Malchus was the servant of the high priest of Jerusalem. According to the Gospel of Luke, Peter severed Malchus’s ear with a sword during Christ’s capture in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Van Dyck depicted Malchus struggling with Peter, whose hand is visible grasping Malchus’s clothing at left. Van Dyck’s strong direction of line, most obvious underneath the figure, reinforces Malchus’s violent gesture.

This drawing is a preparatory study for Anthony van Dyck's painting Betrayal of Christ, now in the Prado Museum, Madrid. It shows Malchus, a priestly attendant, attempting to avoid an assault by the apostle Peter, who will soon slice off Malchus's ear. Much of the point of the drawing is to generate a sense of lateral thrust away from Peter's hand, which grips Malchus's tunic at the left of the image. To achieve this aim, van Dyck aligns various parts of Malchus's body on a diagonal axis and rhymes them with broad, insistently diagonal, shading strokes. In counterpoint, short, stubby marks interpret the outstretched hand as a point of splayed stoppage. A careful look at the contours reveals that they are not made with a continuous line, but with many short concave strokes that give volume to the figure.