Jacob Jordaens

Flemish, 1593–1678

BiographyTogether with Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck, Jacob Jordaens was one of the greatest Flemish painters of the seventeenth century. He was born in Antwerp in May 1593. At the age of fourteen, he was apprenticed to the painter Adam van Noort (1562-1641), who was also a teacher of Rubens. Jordaens was admitted to the Antwerp St. Luke's guild in 1615/16 as a waterschilder (tempera painter), which qualified him to paint cartoons for tapestries and wall coverings. He married Katharina van Noort, the daughter of his teacher, in 1616; the couple had three children.

Jordaens's earliest paintings are dated 1616. He was active as an independent master in Rubens's atelier by the mid 1620s, and collaborated with him on several commissions throughout the 1630s. Jordaens was active as a portraitist, history and genre painter, and designer of tapestries, and was also a printmaker and a prolific draftsman. Particularly after the deaths of Rubens and Van Dyck (in 1640 and 1641, respectively), his work was much in demand by civic, ecclesiastic, and private patrons in Antwerp and throughout Europe--notably England, Sweden, and the northern Netherlands. Jordaens's vigorous, colorful, and plastic style is characterized by a robust naturalism and vitality. He continued to paint until the end of his long life; although there was some decline in his powers at the close of his career, many of these later works are expressive and accomplished.