HUYSMANS, Jacob - b. ~1630 Antwerpen, d. 1696 London - WGA

HUYSMANS, Jacob

(b. ~1630 Antwerpen, d. 1696 London)

Flemish painter, active in England as Jacob Houseman. He was a pupil of Gilles Backereel (c. 1572-before 1662) and Frans Wouters, presumably in Antwerp, but he came to London before the Restoration. Works painted soon after his arrival in England include small pastiches of mythological and religious subjects by Anthony van Dyck, and much of his mature work is in a flamboyantly Baroque manner that derives ultimately from van Dyck’s second Flemish period and suggests, on a larger scale, the influence of Wouters. As a Roman Catholic he was acceptable to Charles II’s consort, Catherine of Braganza, and to other Catholics at the English court.

Principally as a result of the Queen’s patronage, he enjoyed considerable success in the early years of the reign. Huysmans’s most important portrait of Catherine of Braganza, Queen Catharine as a Shepherdess (c. 1664; Royal Collection, Windsor), is an elaborate display in the Arcadian manner, the underlying forms rather stiffly articulated and the flesh smoothly worked, but the costume and the riotous display of accessories painted with a bravura, indeed, in places, a vulgarity, that foreshadows passages in the work of Franz Xaver Winterhalter. The colours are highly individual, and the paint is applied with a boldness unparalleled in this period. A pallid orange tone often gives a strange lurid atmosphere to the background of Huysmans’s compositions.

Portrait of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), was an English poet and courtier of King Charles II’s Restoration court. He helped establish English satiric poetry.

The composition of this portrait, almost certainly of Rochester’s own devising, reflects a typical conceit found in his writing. A light-hearted quip suggestive of the self-depreciation of the man himself, it also carries a deeper message, serving to highlight the perfidy and vanity of man. It portrays Rochester, manuscript in hand and resplendent in silk, bestowing the poet’s laurels on a jabbering monkey which tears the pages from a book and hands them back, crumpled, to the poet. Monkeys feature prominently in Rochester’s writing, along with other animal metaphors, serving to point up the folly and presumption of man.

This spectacular portrait was part of the collection of portraits formed by the 2nd Earl of Warwick, at Warwick Castle in the late eighteenth century. For many years, it has been on loan in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, since the late 1970s.

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Portrait of a Countess

This portrait represents a countess wearing robes for the coronation of James II. The coronation of James II and his Queen, Mary of Modena, took place on 23 April 1685 at Westminster Abbey, and the robes worn by members of the peerage were specially designed for the occasion. The coronet on the table behind the sitter in this painting is that of a Countess in the peerage of England, twenty nine of whom attended James II’s coronation ceremony.

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