Jacques (or Jacob) Jordaens

Jacques Jordaens was born in Antwerp in 1593 as the son of a linen draper and related on his mother’s side to a family of artists¹. In 1607-1608 he became a pupil of Adam van Noort, with whom P.P. Rubens had been apprenticed in 1593. Jordaens was received as a master in the Guild of St Luke in 1615-16, inscribed in the Lists as “Waterschilder” (painter in tempera and water colours) and married Adam van Noort’s daughter Catharina in 1616. Rather than undertaking the customary study trip to Italy upon completing his apprenticeship, Jordaens remained in Antwerp. Despite lack of archival documentation, he worked for a few years in Rubens’s workshop as an assistant as can be deduced from several works that originated in the latter’s studio but bear hallmarks of Jordaens’s style². Jordaens is documented as having enrolled pupils in his own studio from 1620 onwards. In 1621 he was elected dean of the Painters’ Guild of St Luke. Jordaens would go on to become one of the Southern Netherlands’ most prolific tapestry designers³ for which his ability to work in tempera and watercolour was particularly useful. His first introduction to tapestries probably came about in Rubens’s studio when Jordaens was tasked with transferring the masters’s oil sketches into full size tapestry cartoons for the Brussels weavers⁴.

It was also Rubens who sought Jordaens’s (and Anthony van Dyck’s) involvement in three important Antwerp public commissions: the 1617 Mysteries of the Rosary series for the St Paul’s Church, the 1628 three altar pieces for the Augustinian church, the 1635 Joyous Entry into Antwerp of Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand and not least the 1636 Torre de la Parada commission for King Philip IV of Spain⁵. It was only after Rubens’s death in 1640 that Jordaens became the most important painter in the Southern Netherlands and received hugely important international commissions from Charles I of England in 1640 for the Queen’s House, Greenwich; Queen Christina of Sweden in 1648 for Uppsala castle; Amalia van Solms in 1649-52 for the Oranje Zaal, Huis Ten Bosch and from the Amsterdam burgomasters in 1661-4 for their town hall.

Jordaens was a prolific painter of biblical, allegorical and mythological subjects and was also appreciated in his time as good portraitist. However today his fame rests primarily on his innovative large scale genre scenes, many of which depict Flemish proverbs such as “The King drinks” and “As the old sing, so pipe the young”. These works are often misunderstood as mere illustrations of the merry lifestyle led by his contemporaries, when in fact they frequently contain a satirical undertone that has consistently been overlooked⁶, as indeed has Jordaens’s firm adherence from mid-career onwards to Calvinism⁷ in a city and country that was exclusively catholic. It is unclear whether his sporadic travels to the Dutch Republic were for business or religious reasons.

Despite a good knowledge of Rubens’s working practice, Jordaens rarely sketched in oils, though a small number of early head studies on panel, some modelli on canvas and a few sketches in oil on paper survive. His preferred working method was in other media on paper, frequently working in colour washes and brown ink, as well as body colour and gouache, red and black chalks. He also had the habit of enlarging his sheet of paper to accommodate an ever-more elaborate design, a process he might work on over the course of several years.

At first indebted to the mannerist style of his teacher Van Noort and using abundant unnatural illumination and colouring in overcrowded compositions, Jordaens was quick to absorb the styles of Rubens and Caravaggio and simplified his palette as early as 1617, but his handling of paint retained his distinctive and expressive manner of contrasting rough, thick, smooth, and thin. By the mid-1630’s paint layers became more even and compositions more coherent, attaining a painterly silkiness during the 1640’s combined with breezier arrangements. (harsh 19th-20th century relining, perhaps in combination with pigment alterations over time, has unfortunately all too often irreparably damaged the brilliant painterly effects he attained). This development continued during the 1650’s with a greater simplification of folds and facial treatments, sometimes verging on caricature. His colour palette became paler and this combination with mostly dark priming and his increasing dependency on assistants in the 1660’s due to his physical decline, rendered the production of his last years crude.

He died on 18 October 1678 in Antwerp but was buried together with his daughter in the Calvinist church of Putte on the Dutch border where his wife had been laid to rest in 1659.