(Antwerp 1581–1641)
The Four Elements,
oil on canvas, 158 x 200 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, Paris, until 2018

We are grateful to Hans Vlieghe and Jean-Pierre de Bruyn for confirming the attribution after inspection of the present painting in the original.

Artus Wolffort, like Rubens before him, worked in the Antwerp studio of Otto van Veen. Each amplified the mild classicism of their tutor with pronounced dynamism and individuality. Wolffort’s work demonstrates some of the monumental plasticity of Rubens’s oeuvre in the decade following the master’s return from Italy. Conversely, the younger painter’s illusionistic rendering of hair and stiffer drapery, coupled with the particular muscularity and distinct gestures of figures that betray a closer affinity to Rubens’s elder contemporary Abraham Janssens, constitute the artist’s own discernible style (for comparison with Rubens see fig. 1). Rubens is known to have later enlisted Wolffort’s help, among others, in his grandiose programme of decorative arches for the 1635 triumphal entry of Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, a visual record which survives in the engravings of the Pompa Introitus Ferdinandi (Antwerp, circa 1638).

Hans Vlieghe and Jean-Pierre de Bruyn both identified the present painting as another autograph version by Wolffort of his larger canvas in the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (inv. no. 2223). Although that painting was previously given to two other associates of Rubens, Jan Boeckhorst (Münster 1604–1668 Antwerp) and Frans Snijders (Antwerp1579–1657), Vlieghe writes that he has been able to attribute that work to the painter Artus Wolffort on stylistic grounds (see H. Vlieghe, Zwischen Van Veen und Rubens: Artus Wolffort, ein vergessener Antwerpener Maler, in: Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, Westdeutsches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, XXXIX, 1977, pp. 109, 111). Vlieghe writes: ‘The Four Elements are represented here by four nearly life-size figures, shown together and sitting around a brook. From left to right we successively see Fire, Air, Water and Earth. Fire is represented here by Vulcan with a burning torch or a big candle and a forge hammer. Air is visualised by a young naked man, probably representing the sun god Apollo. He is shown here sitting on clouds and having in his hands a bird of paradise and a stick from which dead birds hang. Water is represented by Neptune, shown here with his trident pouring out water and fishes into the brook. Earth finally appears as Ceres, the goddess of fertility, shown here with a cornucopia and a white rabbit, a very fertile animal. In both versions, the rendering of the figures is strikingly similar to that in other paintings by the same master, some of them also signed or monogrammed.’