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Baroque and Rococo
Jacob Jordaens
Jacob Jordaens(bapt Antwerp, 20 May 1593; d Antwerp, 18 Oct 1678).
Flemish painter, tapestry designer and draughtsman. In the context of 17th-century Flemish art, he emerges as a somewhat complicated figure. His oeuvre, the fruit of a continual artistic development, is characterized by great stylistic versatility, to which the length of his career contributed. His religious, mythological and historical representations evolved from the rhetorical prolixity of the Baroque into a vernacular, sometimes almost caricatural, formal idiom. The lack of idealistic treatment in his work is undoubtedly the factor that most removed Jordaens’s art from that of his great Flemish contemporaries Rubens and van Dyck. Jordaens’s officially commissioned works included many paintings in which the sublimity of the subject-matter clashed with the vulgarity of some of his figures. Unlike Rubens and van Dyck, both of whom were knighted in the course of their careers, Jordaens was, in fact, completely ignored by the courts of Spain and Brussels, and he did not receive a single significant commission from Italy, France or England. Only once did Charles I of England grant him a commission, and then under less favourable circumstances. After Rubens’s death in 1640, Jordaens became the most prominent artist in the southern Netherlands. Only then did he receive royal commissions, but these came from the north, where pomp and circumstance were avoided and few demands were made in the way of Baroque perfection. Until then, his patrons had come almost entirely from among the prosperous bourgeoisie. The people of the social circles in which he moved were far less demanding of life, and they manifested a certain indifference towards the values of the culturally refined.
Offering to Ceres, Goddess of Harvest
1618-20
Oil on canvas, 165 x 112 cm
Museo del Prado, Madrid
Meleager and Atalanta
1618
Oil on canvas, 152 x 120 cm
Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp
