In his Self-Portrait with a Sunflower (ca. 1633), the artist Anthony Van Dyck turns to gaze out at the viewer. With one hand he points to himself while holding up for display the gold chain recently presented to him by his patron, the English monarch Charles I; with the other he gestures toward a large sunflower that seems to mirror the artist’s pose. Both the man and plant appear animated, as his tousled hair and the flower’s thick petals appear to respond to the shifting light and billowing atmosphere surrounding them. The picture’s intertwined themes have long been recognized: Van Dyck represents himself as the ideal courtier, whose devotion to his monarch is likened to the flower’s natural inclination to follow the path of the sun, while he also promotes a claim for the nobility of pictorial art. In The Look of Van Dyck, John Peacock develops and specifies these themes in a wide-ranging investigation of the cultural milieu in which the picture was produced. More particularly, he argues that the Self-Portrait offers a subtle, learned, and imaginatively realized meditation on an idealist conception of painting as a mode of vision that apprehends both the natural world and its transcendent...