Flemish painter

Antwerp 1601 – 1678 Antwerp

 

Versatile painter of very diverse subjects, such as history paintings (biblical, mythological and allegorical subjects), landscapes, marine paintings, still lifes, hunting scenes, etc.

 

Pupil of his father, Jan I. Grandson of Pieter Brueghel I.

 

Circa 1622 Jan the Younger travelled to Italy, to Milan. He also stayed in Genoa, in Valetta on Malta and in Palermo on Sicily. He returned to Antwerp in 1625, when he heard that his father had died. He joined the local Painter’s Guild and took over his father’s important workshop; he was 24 years old. A year later, in 1626, he married a daughter of another prominent painter, Abraham Janssens; the couple had 11 children. In the year 1630/31 Jan II was head of the Antwerp Painter’s Guild of Saint Luke. During the 1650s he must have travelled to or even lived for some time in Paris. 

 

Jan II was a prolific painter. He had to take over his father’s large workshop at a very young age (24), he had to finish unfinished works by his father and thus actually took over his father’s style and subjects. His early works are hard to distinguish from his father’s; he only gradually freed himself stylistically and subject wise from that paternal influence during the 1640s. And then of course there is the output of that important number of collaborators in his workshop … .

 

 

Adam and Eve were expelled by God from the Garden of Eden after they ate the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. As a result of that Original Sin they had to live on Earth where they would be confronted with shame (they covered their genitals with clothes), Eve’s pain at childbirth, labour (Adam had to work the ground for food), sickness and death.

 

At the centre of our composition we see Adam working in the field, at left Eve sits in a shelter, with her two first sons, Cain and Abel. 

 

 

Klaus Ertz dates the grand series of six paintings recounting the story of Adam and Eve, that was sold at Christie’s New York in January 2012, to around 1650. According to Ertz (1984, P. 295/296) these fully signed works must have been painted by Jan II, while the figures had been painted by another, yet not identified hand.

 

Jan II and his workshop often produced multiple versions of the same composition. This is not the case with our painting. But I did find several identical versions of the same subject, Adam working in the field, as you may see in my comparative works. In these compositions Jan II borrowed the figural group from a print from 1604 by Jan Pietersz. Sanredam drawn after the Utrecht Master Abraham Bloemaert. 

 

 

Because I did not find another version of our composition, which regularly occurs with paintings given to Jan Brueghel II and his workshop.