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 … .

 

 

Sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century Flemish artists painted on oak panels, on canvas and on copper plates. Copper was the most expensive, but also the best support. Wooden panels can suffer from sudden changes in the degree of humidity, canvasses can be torn, while copper plates are less vulnerable. Because of their even, highly rigid and non-absorbent surface, coppers did not need a preparatory layer (sometimes only a very thin ground) and one can paint extremely precisely, the paint could be applied almost without any visible brushstrokes. In old recipes it was advised to rub the copper plate with garlic, so that the oil paint would adhere better.

 

As copper was more expensive and as one could paint in a very detailed way on them, most copper plates are therefore of rather small dimensions. 

 

Artists painted on copper delicate, elaborate and highly finished paintings with brilliant pictorial effects. Another advantage of these copper plates today is the fact that they have very little craquelures. 

 

 

Our devotional image of the Virgin and Child is set into a decorative garland of flowers, so that the lush still life wreath serves as a tribute to the religious image that it encircles. The overwhelming abundance and rich variety of flowers has been painted by the workshop of Jan Brueghel II. Another painter, who was specialised in figure painting, has produced the figure of the Mother and Child. While the still life garland mirrors natural objects, the representation of the Virgin and Child is an “imago”: its likeness has a higher, spiritual meaning. 

 

Almost certainly the first known garland painting was painted by Jan Brueghel I and Hendrick van Balen around 1607/1608 for the Archbishop of Milan, Federico Borromeo for the Bliblioteca Ambrosiana. It was meant as a tribute to the Madonna paintings destroyed by the Protestant reformers during the 16th century.

 

 

Because it is a good middle 17th century painting on copper, produced in the workshop of Jan Brueghel the Younger. It has a highly detailed garland of flowers set around an intimate Mother and Child scene.