JACOB JORDAENS

Jacob (Jacques) Jordaens (19 May 1593 – 18 October 1678) was a Flemish painter, draughtsman and tapestry designer known for his historical paintings, genre scenes and portraits. After Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck, he was the leading Flemish Baroque painter of his day. Unlike those contemporaries he never travelled abroad to study Italian painting, and his career is marked by an indifference to their intellectual and courtly aspirations. In fact, except for a few short trips to locations in the Low Countries, he remained in Antwerp his entire life.

As well as being a successful painter, he was a prominent designer of tapestries. Like Rubens, Jordaens painted altarpieces, mythological, and allegorical scenes, and after 1640—the year Rubens died—he was the most important painter in Antwerp for large-scale commissions and the status of his patrons increased in general. However, he is best known today for his numerous large genre scenes based on proverbs in the manner of his contemporary Jan Brueghel the Elder, depicting The King Drinks and As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young. Jordaens' main artistic influences, besides Rubens and the Brueghel family, were northern Italian painters such as Jacopo Bassano, Paolo Veronese, and Caravaggio.

This post is part of the Wordless Wednesday meme,

and also part of the ABC Wednesday meme.

Jacob Jordaens: (L) Self Portrait (circa 1648–1650) – Collection of the King Baudouin Foundation. – On loan at Rubenshuis (Antwerp)
(R) Three paintings

Jacob Jordaeens: Mercury and Argus (c. 1635-1640) at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
In 1620 Jordaens first painted Ovid’s mythological story of Mercury and Argus, a tale of the god Jupiter’s transformation of his nymph conquest, Io, into a white heifer. In jealousy Jupiter’s wife Juno sent Argus, disguised as a herdsman, to watch Io, but was foiled when Jupiter dispatched Mercury to lull Argus to sleep and decapitate him. The painting, now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, displayed Jordaen’s flamboyant use of colour, lighting and fluid countour. It was so well-known that Jean-Antoine Watteau reproduced it in his 1721 sign for the Paris picture dealer Gersaint. Fifteen years later Jordaens, by then a leading Flemish painter, produced this smaller replica.