Jacob Jordaens

Jordaens received early training with Adam van Noort (1562–1659), a teacher of Rubens, and entered the guild of Saint Luke in 1615 as a waterschilder, a painter in tempera and watercolors, although a year later he took up oil as his preferred medium. His earliest dated painting in oil is the Adoration of the Shepherds  of 1616 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), a tightly composed nocturnal scene that is conspicuously Caravaggesque. From this early point, the young Jordaens used real people as models for his head studies which served as models for figures in history pictures. Executed in fluid and forceful brushwork, they were prized for their immediacy and tactile quality and notably impressed upon the Dutch portraitist Frans Hals who visited Antwerp in 1616. The large altarpiece Martyrdom of St. Apollonia dated 1628 which remain in the Augustinian Church in Antwerp marks the beginning of Jordaens’ success with major religious commissions across Antwerp. In 1634 he worked with Rubens on the decoration for the Joyeuse Entrée of the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Austria, governor of the Spanish Provinces, and again, in 1637-38 paintings for the Torre de la Parada, Spain. He finished various paintings left unfinished by Rubens who died in 1640. After 1642, Jordaens received commissions from several courts in northern Europe, most importantly producing the Triumph of Frederick Hendrik (1651-52) at Huis ten Bosch near The Hague. He converted to Protestantism around 1655, and although he continued to paint Catholic subjects, late Jordaens more frequently turned to the popular demand for large genre scenes of debaucheries which are among his most important and independent works, The King Drinks (ca. 1640-45; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) and As the old sing, so the young pipe (early 1640s; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa).

Popular among the local bourgeois, Jordaens never became a court painter but received royal commissions from England, Spain and Sweden. He outlived Rubens and Van Dyck by almost 40 years and remained the leading artist of Antwerp until death. Works by Jordaens were in greater demand than any other artist in Northern Europe in the mid seventeenth century and notably, his paintings are referenced within famed compositions by Vermeer, Velazquez, and Watteau. Many works made their way into Russia in the late eighteenth century for the founding of the Hermitage Museum and through the best European collections of the time: Walpole in England, Crozat in France, Gotzkowsky in Germany.