GOVAERTS, Abraham

The painting shows the influence of Gillis van Coninxloo. The staffage figures were made by another painter, probably by Frans Francken II.

Apollo challenged Pan to a musical contest. The contest was judged by the mountain god Tmolus and Apollo was declared victor. King Midas who happened to be present, disagreed with the verdict and was rewarded with ass’s ears by Apollo.

The Flemish landscape painter Abraham Govaerts belongs to the generation of painters influenced by Jan Brueghel the Elder, whose pupil or fervent admirer he must have been.

Pomona, the classical goddess of fruit, and Vertumnus, the god of transformation, are the main figures in an episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (XIV, 608-697). Vertemnus, disguised as an old woman, tries to seduce Pomona, goddess of the fruit-gardens. The flowers and fruits, in the minute grace of their rendering, are worthy of Jan Brueghel, while Govaerts’s lyricism makes the work all the more powerful.

This painting, representing a wooded landscape with a woman in a horse-drawn cart and a shepherd and his herd on a path, a peasant playing a flute in the left foreground, was painted in collaboration with Alexander Keirincx (1600-1652).

The picture shows a wooded landscape with peasants with a horse-drawn cart near a farm and shepherds with their flock on a path in the background.