Van Dijk

Van Dijk means from the dike, and in the Netherlands that is not a decorative address. The dike is the long earthwork that holds the North Sea off ground which often lies below it, the structure on which the country stands, and the name points at either a dijk somebody lived on or beside, or at one of the many place names ending in -dijk. A household was identified by the largest thing in sight, and the largest thing in sight was man-made.

By 2007 Van Dijk was the sixth commonest surname in the Netherlands, carried by 56,441 people, and the densest concentration was not a city: it was Zwartewaterland, where 2.43 per cent of the population bore it. In Belgium the name is scarce, 474 bearers in 2008, thickest in Hoogstraten.

That describes an address rather than a family. Dike ran the length of the country, so the same byname could be given to any household set against any stretch of it, and a surname carried by tens of thousands of people points back to no single ancestor.

Van Dyck and Vandyck are the same Dutch toponymic surname as Van Dijk, originally written Van Dijck, and the y and the ij are two ways of setting down one sound rather than the mark of two families. The painter baptised at Antwerp in 1599 as Anthonis van Dijck, seventh child of the silk merchant Frans van Dijck, is filed in English as Anthony van Dyck and in Dutch as Antoon van Dyck; the Dutch painter Abraham van Dyck (1635-1680) is catalogued under a preferred spelling of van Dijck. Knighted in London in 1632, Anthony anglicised his own name to Vandyke, the form the diaspora settled on and the form the pointed beard still carries.

The van is a tussenvoegsel, a preposition that long ago lost its grammatical work, and Dutch usage still moves it: a lower-case v after a given name (Jan van Dijk), a capital without one (de heer Van Dijk). English-speaking countries kept no such rule, and Van Dyck is one of the standing examples of an emigrant family whose prefix was capitalised for it and never came back down.

Floris van Dyck was born at Delft around 1575 and lived most of his life in Haarlem. In 1600 he is documented in Rome, a good friend of the painter Joseph van Arpino, and he witnessed Arpino cured of an ailment by an oil supplied by the Pope's personal physician, a cure that let him finish his altarpiece in the Archbasilica of St John Lateran. He came home in 1606 and settled at Haarlem, probably living with or near his uncle Cornelis van Rijck, a brewer who had moved his trade from Delft to the De Olyphant brewery there.

He became one of Karel van Mander's sources on the modern Italian painters for the Schilder-boeck, though like the young Frans Hals and van Mander's other assistants he got no entry of his own in it. He joined the Haarlem Guild of St Luke in 1610 and was its dean by 1637, and on 11 September 1625 he married for the second time, to Cornelia Jansdr. Vlasman. Working from Osias Beert and Clara Peeters, he is reckoned with Nicolaes Gillis the inventor of the banketje, the banquet still life, and he passed the manner on to Pieter Claesz and Roelof Koets. He died at Haarlem before 26 April 1651.

Anthony van Dyck was born at Antwerp on 22 March 1599 and began formal training at ten under Hendrick van Balen the Elder. He was admitted a free master of the Antwerp Guild of St Luke on Saint Luke's day, 18 October 1617, by which time he was already working in the studio of Peter Paul Rubens. Within a few years he was Rubens's chief assistant, and Rubens called the nineteen-year-old the best of his pupils. From late 1621 he spent six years in Italy, mostly at Genoa; quarantined at Palermo during the 1624 plague, he painted the city's plague saint Rosalia in a form that became the standard iconography for Italian Baroque painters after him.

By 1630 he was court painter to the Archduchess Isabella, Habsburg Governor of Flanders. He came back to London at Charles I's request in April 1632, was knighted in July with a pension of two hundred pounds a year as principalle Paynter in ordinary to their majesties, and was given a house at Blackfriars. He is reckoned to have painted some forty portraits of the King and thirty of the Queen. He died at Blackfriars on 9 December 1641, the day his daughter Justiniana was baptised, and was buried in the choir of St Paul's; the tomb the King raised over him burned in the Great Fire of 1666. His manner governed English portrait painting for more than 150 years.

Henry H. Van Dyck was born at Kinderhook in Columbia County in 1809 and trained as a printer. He edited the Goshen Independent Republican from 1830, bought it in 1832, and sold it on his election to the New York State Senate, where he sat from 1837 to 1840. He was co-owner of the Albany Argus and then of the Albany Atlas, joined the Republican Party in 1856 and cast a presidential elector's vote for John C. Fremont, and served as Superintendent of Public Instruction and then of the Banking Department. In 1865 Lincoln appointed him Assistant United States Treasurer in New York, and he held the office until 1869.

His brother Cornelius Van Alen Van Dyck, born at Kinderhook in 1818, took his medical degree at Jefferson Medical College in 1839 and was sent to Lebanon the next year as a medical missionary for the Dutch Reformed Church. He learned Arabic at Beirut under Butrus al-Bustani and Nasif al-Yaziji, wrote Arabic textbooks on geography, navigation, natural history and mathematics that were long used in Syrian schools, and finished his translation of the Bible into Arabic in 1865, travelling to New York to supervise the printing. He came back to teach pathology and internal medicine at the Syrian Protestant College, later the American University of Beirut. Known in his lifetime as al-Hakim, he died at Beirut in 1895.

Eindhoven had three mayors named Van Dijk born in the 1740s: Adriaan in 1743, Godefridus in 1746 and Petrus in 1749. Petrus was the son of a fourth, mayor Johan van Dijk, and that is the only link the record states. In daily life he was a merchant in timber and iron, and he married Barbara van Mierlo at Eindhoven on 9 June 1771, herself the daughter of a mayor of the town.

He held the mayoralty in 1775 and 1776, then lived through every regime the town passed through. In 1786 and 1787 he belonged to the patriot Vaderlandse Societeit Concordia; in 1795 he sat on the council of the new municipaliteit; in 1796 he was colonel of the Eindhoven civic guard and its president until 1800; in 1797 he was master of the town gates. Under French administration he served on the conseil municipal from 1808 to 1812, and afterwards was back on the town council from 1816 to 1819. He died at Eindhoven in 1834.

The Dutch record carries one clearly stated line of the name in the theatre: Ko van Dijk sr. (1881-1937), actor and company director, and his son Ko van Dijk jr. (1916-1978), who worked on stage, on television, in film and in radio drama and directed as well. Beside them stand Hilbert van Dijk (1908-1944), a resistance man of the Second World War, and Wijtske van Dijk-Meindersma (1902-2010), who ended her life as the oldest inhabitant of the Netherlands. In Belgium the Dyck spelling gave the dramatic tenor Ernest van Dyck (1861-1923).

The name reached the modern scoreboard in quantity: the swimmer Edith van Dijk, born 1973, the racing cyclist Ellen van Dijk, born 1987, and the footballer Virgil van Dijk, born 1991. None of them is documented as kin to any other, which is the point of a name like this one. It was never a dynasty. It was a place to live, repeated the length of a coast, and what it still says is the household by the wall that keeps the water out.