(Antwerp 1601–1678)
Adam and Eve in Paradise,
oil on copper, 53 x 86 cm, framed

We are grateful to Klaus Ertz for confirming the authenticity of the present painting. A certificate (11th June 2016) is available.

This is a characteristic example of Jan Brueghel the Younger’s later and more individual style that he developed from circa 1650 onwards. Klaus Ertz writes: “Although Jan the Younger frequently employed specialised figure painters for his compositions of biblical themes, the surviving fragments of his diary, although containing ample evidence of these joint projects, are not helpful in specifically identifying the painter he chose for the paradisiacal landscapes of his later period. It is known that the painters he collaborated with around the middle of the century included Abraham Diepenbeek, David Teniers the Younger, Frans Wouters, Jan van de Perre, and Abraham Willemsen. The theme of the paradisiacal landscape played a crucial role in Jan Brueghel the Younger’s art from the very beginning, as he dealt with this major theme of Christian landscape painting from the 1620s until well into the 1650s. Until the late 1630s, the focus was on the overall pictorial message of the paradisiacal landscape, whereas later on, the individual motifs were pushed to the fore, causing the pictorial space of the landscape to dissolve into numerous isolated tiles of a mosaic. As a rule, these paradisiacal landscapes are unsigned, so when suggesting dates for them one must rely on the artist’s general stylistic development. His late paradisiacal landscapes, on the other hand, are frequently signed and sometimes also dated. In these later pictures devoted to the subject of Paradise, the painter sought to invent new spatial concepts for the scenery, such as in the ‘Cycle of Adam’, to which the painting to be assessed here belongs. An explicitly painterly brushwork employed in a more liberal and rapid fashion, reveals an artist who by then had entirely detached himself from the style of his earlier period, which had been inspired by his father’s meticulous and detailed manner of painting. Outlining his forms with a loose, swift, and sweeping brush, he now concentrated on the overall impact of painterly diversity rather than on painstaking detail and precision: pure colours gave way to a more uniform and subtle chromatic approach, which, however, continued to remain true to the ‘Flemish colourfulness’ typical of the painters from Flanders.”

In order to corroborate the attribution of the present painting to Jan Brueghel the Younger, Ertz compares it to the following autograph works by the master:

(1) Paradisiacal Landscape with the Creation of Adam, circa 1650 (sale, Lepke, Berlin, 1908);
(2) Paradisiacal Landscape with the Fall of Man, circa 1650 (Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan);
(3) Paradisiacal Landscape with the Expulsion, circa 1650 (Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan);
(4) The Expulsion from Paradise, circa 1650 (private collection, USA)

Based on these comparisons, Ertz dates the present painting, which varies the composition of one of the works in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan (no. 3), to the period around 1650. In his opinion the figures are by a still unidentified follower of Hendrick van Balen.