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.
