JORDAENS, Jacob

This is without doubt one of Jacob Jordaens’ most magnificent compositions and one of the most successful examples of his cooperation with still-life specialist Frans Snyders. In this work, painted around 1623, a good eight years after Jordaens had become a free master, the painter is at the peak of his career. Nothing remains of the clumsiness of his youthful work. Whether the eye stays on the anatomy or the expressions of the figures, on their rhythmic ordering or their gestures, or enjoys the creamy, confident paint strokes or the alternation between the golden light and the transparent shadows, or is tempted by the rich colours of Snyders’ opulent fruits: everywhere it senses the same impressive harmony.

The life-size figures, allowing only a glimpse of the landscape to show through, unfold like a sculpted frieze on both sides of a female nude, seen from behind, standing slightly off centre and so introducing a certain dynamism into the composition. Her nakedness catches the full light and draws the viewer’s attention. A golden glow strokes her skin, in which nothing reminds us of the cold stone from which her sculptural monumentality initially seems to originate. Rather, as a nymph she belongs, together with her female companions and the satyrs surrounding her, to the category of beings between humans, gods and animals which in antiquity embodied the untameable powers of nature. The grapes that they are all gathering possibly symbolise the rich fertility of nature. For this reason the identification of the nymph seen from behind as “Humanity” is not convincing. Just as unsatisfactory is the identification of the woman in a red mantle to her right as Pomona, the goddess of fruit.

The cornucopia on the far right is a reference to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which tells how it came into being when the horn of Achelous, metamorphosed into a bull, broke off in his fight with Hercules. It was not Pomona but the water nymphs or naiads that afterwards filled it with fruit. In Jordaens’ picture we do not, however, find the unambiguous references to Hercules and his unfortunate opponent, making it difficult to correctly title this masterpiece.

This sketch for the homonymous painting in the Brussels museum is fascinating in more than one respect. First of all because it allows us, so to speak, to look over the artist’s shoulder during the creation process. A comparison between the drawn object and the painted composition shows us how Jordaens strongly increased the concentration of the figures in the painting. By omitting motifs from the original sketch, such as a figure looking upwards to the right of the woman with a mantle and a goat or ass on the right edge, the satyrs to the right are more closely connected with the nymphs in the middle. The painter makes the link between both groups even tighter by having the nymph’s hand reach upward at the back and by reversing the position and the direction of the gaze of the crouching nude in the front. Finally the central group of women is made tighter by the removal of a flute-playing satyr in the background and of one of the children in the foreground.

In a second draft sketch, conserved in the Copenhagen museum, most of the changes have already been carried out, demonstrating how the artist achieved his balanced final result not immediately but in various phases. We note that Jordaens already planned the cornucopia in his sketches, although in the final painting it was executed by Frans Snyders. The lowering of the skyline in the painting is to be attributed to a later shortening of the canvas by a foreign hand. Secondly this sketch illustrates Jordaens’ preference for pen and paper as against chalk in his initial designs, unlike Rubens, who frequently opted for oil paint sketches. This concords with Jordaens’ training as a “water painting painter”. This technique had been developed in earlier generations, in particular in Mechelen, where it was used to produce a cheaper variant of tapestry, which was very expensive. On the one hand a drawn sketch was less good than an oil paint sketch in suggesting both the placing of the shapes and their colouring and modelling. On the other hand, it allowed an artist with a good command of ink and water to achieve a lively linear handling, a subtle chiaroscuro effect and a sense of nuance. Jordaens has taken full advantage of the possibilities of this balanced drawing technique in this sketch.

Jordaens painted a series of apostles between 1623 and 1625. The model of these characteristic heads was Abraham Graphäus, the messenger of the St Luke Guild in Antwerp.

The pagan inhabitants of Lystra in Asia Minor, witnessing the miraculous cure of a cripple by Paul and Barnabas, believed that they were Mercury and Jupiter come to earth in human form. When the priest of the temple of Jupiter brought oxen and garlands to make a sacrifice the apostles rent their clothes in dismay. By their exhortations they prevented the sacrifice taking place.

Taking this episode from the Act of Apostles, Jordaens’s painting shows the influence of both Veronese and Raphael.

The work depicting the theme of As the Old Sang, the Young Play Pipes (“So de oude songen, so pypen de jongen”), signed by Jordaens and dated 1638, is the earliest known version of this highly popular theme which the artist painted and drew on a variety of occasions. This wonderful family concert shows Jordaens at his best.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 2 minutes):

Thomas Weelkes: Madrigal (Springtime Song)

The painting depicts the legendary banquet of Antony and Cleopatra. Cleopatra organized a feast in a bet that she could spend the largest fortune on a meal. Although the fare was simple, Cleopatra defeated Antony by dissolving one outsized pearl earring in acid and swallowing the drink.

In the years around 1640, the successful Antwerp artist Jordaens painted a number of works with mythological scenes that differed strongly from his previous production, both in terms of dimensions and the relationship between figures and landscapes. The present work uses the Antwerp cabinet-painting format, a comparatively small size of picture for Jordaens that follows in the tradition of Frans Francken II, Hendrick van Balen and Jan Brueghel the Elder. Diana and Actaeon is the first example in Jordaens’s oeuvre in which landscape came to assume an importance of its own, becoming as significant in the painting as the historical scene with its small-scale, almost incidental figures. This painting must be seen as one of the most important examples of this group.

Fully in keeping with Ovid (Metamorphoses, III, 138-252), the hunter, who is on the left, carrying a spear and followed by his dogs, is dressed to great effect in a length of red cloth. Separated by no more than a narrow stretch of water flowing along the lower edge of the painting we see the naked figures of Diana and her companions, almost in a direct line before the hunter and seemingly lined up for the viewer. The blatant nudity of these delightful, voluptuous women departs strangely from Ovid’s descriptions, in which, upon their discovery by Actaeon, the surprised nymphs try to cover and hide themselves.

In Jordaens’s composition, Diana and her companions seem to have frozen somewhat half-heartedly into droll poses; after all, the depiction of the undraped female body was the major reason for the artist’s choice of this subject. So Jordaens makes the most of his opportunity, and depicts the women caught performing their post-hunt ablutions in ten different positions, some curiously bent, some standing, and some crouching. With this group Jordaens demonstrates his prowess in painting the nude.

The dynamic landscape, with its bizarre broken tree trunk jabbing at the sky above the terrified nymph and its low-set horizon, is in the tradition of the Flemish forestscape, but does not match up to the works of Jordaens’s fellow Antwerp artist Rubens. Jordaens, in whose oeuvre the landscape played but a marginal role, was nevertheless skilled in employing its elements to give weight to the content of figurative scenes and heighten drama.

The court painters Rubens and Van Dyck regarded art as an elevated intellectual activity and were firmly convinced that the creation of art was on a far loftier plane than any other manual work. Jordaens was rooted in a section of society bounded by more modest horizons. He devoted his life to furthering his personal prosperity, and considered that his material wealth and skill as an artist earned him the right to enjoy the status of a respected citizen. This somewhat bourgeois element is also reflected in his oeuvre, even in the mythological works such as The Education of Jupiter, in which the inhabitants of Olympus appear to be taken straight from everyday life, in spite of their nakedness.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 38 minutes):

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Symphony in C Major (Jupiter-Symphony) K 551

After the death of Rubens in 1640, Jacob Jordaens became the leading artist of the Southern Netherlands. He was primarily active in Antwerp, and his artistic aspirations did not extend quite so high as those of Rubens. Jordaens showed himself to be an uncomplicated member of the middle-class, and there is little room in his work for reflection or any feeling of transcendence. Although he never visited Italy, he was strongly influenced by Caravaggio. Traces of this influence are visible in the contrast between light and dark which serves to heighten the dramatic tension of his Meleager and Atalanta painted in 1618. The painting’s subject is taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 12 minutes):

George Frideric Handel: Atalanta, Act 3 (excerpts)

Jacob Jordaens studied under Rubens, but he accentuated the popular and everyday, even in subjects of classical nature such as the Offering to Ceres.

Jacob Jordaens’s portraits - however high their quality - can only take a subsidiary place in the totality of his production. From the 1620s his portraits show a gradual evolution towards more liveliness and depth. From the mid-1630s he became prominent as a portrait painter, with a style analogous to that of the later Rubens and Van Dyck.

As Grand Almoner of Antwerp, the merchant Le Witer was responsible for collecting charitable gifts. On the corner of the table is an object referring to this function, an offering plate with the inscription ‘[A]lemos[e] 1623’, the year in which Le Witer took up this office. The small, fettered figurine indicates that the alms were intended for prisoners.

Her fine, transparent veil coming forward in a “widow’s peak” tells us that the lady was a widow when she sat for one of Flanders most popular painters. She was frankly middle-aged, yet vigorous and fully present.

The sitter, depicted half length, wearing a straw hat with a sprig of honeysuckle and an ostrich plume, holding a basket, was the eldest child of Jacob Jordaens and his wife Catharina van Noort. She was born in Antwerp in 1617 and died in Antwerp on the same day as her father, almost certainly from the plague, on 6th October 1679. She is buried along with her father and mother, who had died 19 years previously, in the churchyard of the Calvinist community at Putte, near Ossendracht.

In this portrait of his daughter Elizabeth, at the age of about twenty, the sensitivity of which Jordaens is capable is demonstrated.

Anna Catharina Jordaens was the last of Jordaens’ three children from his marriage of 1616 to Catharina van Noort. The child is portrayed full length, standing on a terrace holding her pet finch.

Jordaens’s painting is a variation on a theme that Rubens attempted early in his career and which derived formally from studies by Michelangelo.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 17 minutes):

Karl Goldmark: Prometheus Bound, overture op.38

This painting shows the Antwerp master working after Federico Barocci, with a new freedom of colour and brushwork.

The theme is taken from a fable by the ancient Greek author Aesop. In the right foreground a satyr gets up brusquely from a table to which he has been invited by a peasant family, and admonishes his host, sitting to the left, for cooling his hot porridge by blowing on it, whereas earlier he had warmed his cold hands with the same breath when travelling home with the satyr. The peasant “blows both hot and cold”. This still popular expression means that someone does not take a clear position and is therefore unreliable.

The earnestness of this moralising message appears, however, to be lost on this country group. The satyr’s approach is greeted rather with astonishment. The plump young farmer’s wife stops eating, but looks like she still does not understand clearly what is going on. Her child is uninterested by the satyr and looks at the viewer rascally. From inside the shadowed canopy of her wicker chair the grandmother bends her wrinkled head, in pointed contrast to the flushed head of the young peasant woman in the same pose beneath her. To the left the composition is rounded off by a fresh, softly smiling milkmaid. The lumbering dog under the table and the cock proudly enthroned on top of grandmother’s chair seem equally unperturbed. The very low horizon, just visible under the peasant’s chair, makes the country people tower above the viewer, lending them an imposing monumentality which one would normally expect with high-born people. As simple people they take, with a certain dignity, their appointed place in the social order.

Jordaens’ lifelike characterisation of the peasants, full of insight into human nature, and their closeness to nature expressed in their unpolished manners must have strongly seduced the city-dwellers commissioning these tableaux, who considered themselves as more civilised. In a later version, also in the Brussels museum, the fable appears to turn into a good-humoured joke. There the warm palette and the rich texture have made way for the more even reproduction of colours and materials that are typical of the artist’s later work. Jordaens’ oeuvre contains various other paintings on this theme, including one in the G�teborg museum that literally repeats the Brussels canvas.

Depicted in this painting are the artist’s father Jacob Jordaens the Elder, a merchant in canvases, together with his wife Barbara van Wolshaten; the artist himself, with a lute in his hands; and his seven brothers and sisters. In the foreground are the twins Abraham and Isaac; Elizabeth is seated on the knees of her mother; to the left of her is Maria, and to the right, cut off by the edge of the canvas, there is Catherine. The girl looking up is Anna, and next to her, in the very centre, to the left of the head of the family is Magdalena.

This is an early painting of the artist, its datation is possible from the knowledge of the ages of the family members.

The bread on the table and the wine in the head of family’s glass represent the faith that unites its members. The lute in the artist’s hands represents family harmony. The putti hovering above probably stand for three more sisters who died in infancy.

The bread on the table and the wine in the head of family’s glass represent the faith that unites its members. The dog represents the strength of marital ties.

The detail shows the head of the artist.

This is one of the earliest portraits by Jordaens. In it the figures seem to be crowded together in the foreground, so that their attitudes and outlines still look somewhat Mannerist. They fit into the sixteenth-century tradition of the family portrait; here, too, family harmony is expressed by emblematic details, such as fruit, flowers and musical instruments, and by the organic relationship of the different personages.

This painting is related to a commission Jordaens received a from the Augustinians in Antwerp for an altarpiece. The present canvas was either a modello for the altarpiece or a ricordo for the patrons, executed after its completion.

Like Rubens, Jordaens ran a large workshop with numerous assistants. The paintings in the various museums undoubtedly include a variety of workshop products, in which the master had only a partial hand. Jordaens’ skilful technique and deft observation can, however, be admired in their purest form in the double Studies of the Head of Abraham Grapheus. The artist must have been especially inspired by the shaggy head of his model - a messenger at the Antwerp Painters’ Guild - as he appears in many of his paintings.

The often depicted story gave the Baroque painters an opportunity to paint a scene that combined naked female beauty with the spying male gaze. The painters vied to come up with new takes on the story to give the scene an unexpected twist.

Jordaens painted several versions of the subject, representing a popular custom, the feast of the Bean King.

A merry company is gathered round a well-spread table, presided over by an old man with a crown on his head who is king for the day. This was the honour conferred by popular custom on the one who found the bean in the cake baked for this occasion, the feast of Epiphany, when ordinary people played at being the king and his court, as a safety-valve for dissatisfaction with the actual order of things. In the 17th century, this ‘Bean Feast,’ a celebration dating from the Middle Ages which Jordaens was the first to capture in paint, became a popular genre subject. The king’s duties consisted mostly of raising his glass at regular intervals, when everyone else would do the same, with the shout ‘The King drinks!’ Given the general merriment here, this must already have happened several times.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 5 minutes):

Otto Nicolai: Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives of Windsor), drinking song

Jordaens painted several versions of the subject, representing a popular custom, the feast of the Bean King.

The composition of this version did not remain fixed from the beginning. Over some 15 or 20 years, the pictorial surface was extended with several strips of canvas, recognisable by the seams. In this way Jordaens made room for the two couples on the left, extrapolating from the boisterous merrymaking of the central group to illustrate two specific consequences of drinking alcohol. While the helpless old man embodies the vice of lethargy, the amorous frenzy of the younger exemplifies unchastity. But it is the dog in the foreground that really encapsulates the bad end the party is to come to. In less than a moment, the cutlery and glassware from the falling basket will hit the floor with a crash and a tinkle, startling the assembled guests.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 5 minutes):

Otto Nicolai: Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives of Windsor), drinking song

Jordaens was one of Rubens’ most promising students and upon his master’s death acquired the title of “principal Antwerp painter”. The painting captures The Festival of the Bean King - celebrated on January 6th. A pie containing a single bean is served on this day and the guest who receives it becomes the “Bean King”. Three people are recognizable in the painting: “The Bean King” - Jordaens’ father-in-law; the woman to the left - Jordaens’ wife, Elizabeth; and the man with the upraised pitcher, Jordaens himself.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 5 minutes):

Otto Nicolai: Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives of Windsor), drinking song

This attractive group portrait is a skilful depiction of the artist’s close family. Jordaens portrays himself with his wife Catharina van Noort and their first child, Elizabeth, born on 26 June 1617, whose age allows us to date the work approximately. Catharina sits sturdily on an armchair; she is recognisable for her slightly almond-shaped eyes, prominent nose and fleshy, slightly drooping lower lip. Their daughter is depicted with an appealingly childlike expression. Jordaens is personified by a dashing man standing upright, with his right hand and foot leaning on another armchair, the former on the back and the latter on the lower crosspiece. His left hand holds a lute, a symbol of family harmony. The couple are elegantly dressed in black and display spectacular white ruffs. Catharina wears a small a bonnet, an elaborate jewel in her hair and earrings in her ears. Apart from their little daughter, the couple is accompanied by another woman, probably a servant, holding a basket of grapes.

The group is depicted in a garden; the setting is subordinate to the overall effect without any predominant details. It has led art historians to believe that the painting belongs to a long tradition dating back to the medieval period of including the protagonists in a typical jardin d’amour. Rubens brought this custom to culmination in works such as the Garden of Love, and the tradition attained its height of development thanks to the 18th-century lyrical taste of Watteau and his brilliant f�tes galantes.

The right side of the huge painting contains the biblical scene of the Tribute Money: apostle Peter on the lake at Capernaum miraculously finds a coin in the mouth of the first fish to bite. The coin allows Jesus and his disciples to pay compulsory tribute money to the temple in Jerusalem. The ferryboat, heavily loaded with animals and passengers of all ages and nationalities, takes up the greater part of the canvas.

In the 17th century, following the example given by the Carracci and by Caravaggio, painters depicted the Evangelists as robust men of the people. This picture, which dates from between 1620 and 1625, is painted in vigorous and thick brushwork - a technique very different from that of Rubens.

This lavish depiction originates in the custom, at the Feast of the Three Kings (6 January), of proclaiming the person finding a bean hidden in his tart king for the evening and having him select his court from among those present.

In the middle, behind the festive board, laden with expensive dinnerware, waffles, pastries and wine, sits enthroned the king of the evening. We easily recognise the old man as Jordaens’ father-in-law, the painter Adam van Noort. He raises his glass to his mouth, at which everyone loudly proclaims: “The king drinks!”. To the right of the festive pig the court musician is enlivening the solemn moment with his bagpipes, and next to him his butler lifts wine jug and glass with a sweeping gesture. To the left the court fool responds by raising his lighted pipe. The boisterous reactions of the other guests show that they have already indulged heavily in food and drink. In the right foreground a mother has to clean her crying child. To the left a bragging man lifts his cap and can into the air, whilst a dog jumps up at the surrounding hullabaloo. The drunkard in the left foreground, in the process of vomiting, grabs giddily at the back of a chair, tipping a set of drinking vessels noisily to the ground.

Certain art historians have seen in this depiction of extreme merriment a turning away from such behaviour by a soberly inclined artist who had become a Protestant in later life. This interpretation may well be as unsatisfactory as the earlier reading of it as an ode to pleasure within the warm family circle, a concept so popular that it even founds its way onto biscuit tin lids. The surfeit to which Jordaens’ figures are giving themselves over, but which is not really doing them much good, receives a somewhat ambivalent commentary in the cartouche in the top centre: “In een vry gelachllst goet gast syn” (where there is a free meal it is good to be a guest). A contradiction appears to exist between the message and the scene confronting us. Here the realisation that one should count oneself lucky not to have to pay the bill leads too far from pleasant excesses. Jordaens’ presentation is therefore not free from a certain amount of irony.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 5 minutes):

Otto Nicolai: Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives of Windsor), drinking song

Jacob Jordaens became an independent master in Antwerp in 1615. After 1615 he painted many large pictures with figures of monumental stature. They include mythological and allegorical scenes, such as the present painting. The subject and the narrative content of these kind of paintings make it plain that they were intended for the open market and for burgher homes in Antwerp. These large works are also remarkable for their Mannerist appearance.

Formerly it was thought that the painting is by Frans Snyders or Adriaen van Utrecht.

The subject of this painting - very popular at the period and painted by Jordaens a number of times - is adapted from a fable by the ancient Greek author Aesop. A satyr is curious to know about human ways, and asks a peasant working in the fields why he is blowing on his hands. The peasant explains that he is doing it to warm them. He then invites the satyr to join him for a meal. At the table, the peasant blows on his soup to cool it, and unable to understand how this could be, the satyr departs, full of mistrust.

Jordaens shows us the scene from a little below, as if it were set on a stage. What we see is the moment when the peasant is blowing on the soup to cool it, before raising the spoon to his mouth. With eloquent gestures, the women explain what he is doing, while the demeanour of the satyr, unable to see the difference, expresses all his sceptical distrust. Beneath and between the dramatically accentuated hands, the peasant, at the centre of the composition but taking no part in the discussion, sits savouring his soup. Jordaens here offers us a humorous look at the satyr’s conclusion in the fable, that one should distrust anyone who blows hot and cold with the same breath.

At Frederik Hendrik’s death in 1674, his widow, Amalia von Solms, conceived a new plan to honour the life, deeds, and memory of her late husband in the Oranjezaal in her own new palace Huis ten Bosch. Constantijn Huygens would serve as adviser, and Jacob van Campen was commissioned to oversee the execution of the painted decoration. The decorations cover the walls of the cross-shaped central hall with chamfered inner corners from floor to ceiling and were executed by Pieter de Grebber, Salomon de Bray, Caesar van Everdingen, Pieter Soutman, Gerrit van Honthorst, and Jacob van Campen himself. In addition to these Northern Netherlandish artists, several Southern Netherlandish painters were also retained, including Jacob Jordaens, who completed the largest canvas in 1652, Triumph of Frederik Hendrik, and Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert and Theodoor van Thulden. With its programmatic mixture of mythology, allegory, and actual historical events, the cycle recalls the glorifying decorative programs that Rubens had painted for the Spanish, French, and English courts.

The picture shows the wall of the Oranjezaal with Jacob Jordaens’s Triumph of Frederik Hendrik.