(Mechelen circa 1570 – circa 1628 Brussels) and
(Brussels circa 1570–1629/30)
The Death of Adonis,
oil on canvas, 56 x 85 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, France;
art market, France;
where acquired by the present owner

We are grateful to Luuk Pijl for confirming the attribution of the present picture to Denis van Alsloot, with figures by Hendrick de Clerck on the basis of a photograph. A copy of his certificate, dated 17 January 2022, is available. 

The rolling craggy landscape of the present work, closed off typically with Brueghellian serpentine trees to left and right, provides the setting for The Death of Adonis, an episode taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The lover of Venus, Adonis was gored to death by a jealous Jupiter, who turned himself into a boar to kill his rival whilst Adonis was out hunting. In the present canvas Pijl notes Alsloot’s execution of the landscape ‘in a typical Flemish colour scheme: brown, green and blue, adding significantly to the suggestion of depth in the composition, structured by several stone bridges with torrents beneath and a castle atop the outcrop dominating the scenery’. The smoothness of the flesh of the figures depicted is typical of the handling of de Clerck, giving them a refined, enamel-like finish. 

 Van Alsloot played a significant role in Flemish artistic life, appointed as court painter in 1599 to Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella who governed Flanders. His 1615 portrayal of the Ommegang in Brussels showing the Triumphal Entry of Archduchess Isabella (conserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London) is a major document of historical record (including the first depiction of the famous Manneken Pis statue). However, very little is known of van Alsloot’s life other than that he was the son of a tapestry weaver and as member of the Brussels Guild of Saint Luke between 1599 and 1625 only took on four apprentices. Hendrick de Clerck, who often painted the staffage in van Alsloot’s compositions, was one of the leading figure painters in Flanders, notably commissioned to paint several new altarpieces to replace those destroyed in the iconoclasm of 1566–67.  Along with Marten de Vos, he was the major practitioner of the late mannerist tradition in the Low Countries before the transformational impact of Peter Paul Rubens’s return from Italy in 1608.