Flemish painter

Antwerp 1587 – 1631 Antwerp

 

His name is also spelt ‘Maerten Rijckaert’.

 

Landscape painter.

Pupil of his father and of the landscape painter Tobias Verhaecht (Antwerp 1561 – 1631 Antwerp). 

 

Marten belonged to an important artistic family of Antwerp:

- his father, David I (1560 –  circa 1607), was already a painter, but probably not of pictures but a decorator of woodwork and sculptures;

- his elder brother, David II (1586 - 1642), was a still life painter;

- his nephew, David III (1612 – 1661), a son of David II, was a genre scene painter;

- Catharina, the eldest daughter of David II, married Gonzales Coques (1618 – 1684), a pupil of David II who specialised in genre-like portraits. 

 

David II seems not to have been very amused at the fact that his daughter married Coques in 1643 only two months after the birth of their first child, a daughter.

 

Funny enough David I married twice Marten’s and David II’s mother: first in a Protestant ceremony in 1585, then again four years later, in 1589, in a Catholic way. In between both marriages the two eldest children, the two painter-sons, had already been baptised in a Catholic manner. One has to see this against a religious and political background: the Iconoclast Fury of 1566, the horrific Sack of Antwerp by Spanish soldiers of 1576, the creation of an anti-Spanish Calvinist Republic in Antwerp from 1577 until 1585 (the very year of the first marriage), the re-integration of Antwerp in the Spanish Catholic Netherlands.

 

In the year 1611/12, at the age of twenty our painter became a member of the Painters’ Guild of Saint Luke of his birthplace Antwerp.

Ryckaert must have travelled to Italy between 1607 and 1611. Here he fell under the influence of the Flemish landscape painter Paul Bril. Bril (Antwerp 1554 – 1626 Rome) was a highly regarded Flemish landscape painter who remained active in Rome from 1575 until his death over 50 years later. He made an evolution from Mannerist to realistic, but still very poetic landscape painting. Together with the German Adam Elsheimer (who died at a very young age) he had a huge influence on a complete generation of Italian and Nordic painters.

 

Ryckaert is further documented in Antwerp from 1611 until his death in 1631 at the age of 43.

He never married.

 

Marten Ryckaert was handicapped: he missed his left arm. This handicap was described in the entry of his registration in the Painters’ Guild and is also clearly visible in the portrait that Sir Anthony van Dyck made of him.