Antwerp’s economic and cultural prosperity in the first half of the seventeenth century triggered an extraordinary power of innovation and creativity among the city’s artists. At the same time, the demand for paintings in cabinet format, which were affordable for the urban bourgeoisie, increased.
Specialized genre, landscape, and still life painters such as Jan Brueghel the Elder and the Younger, Hendrick van Balen and Frans Francken were at the forefront of highly productive artists’ workshops. These painters and their studios formed networks and cooperated in the production of paintings with an intensity and professionalism that had never before been seen in Netherlandish painting.
The rich collection of Flemish cabinet paintings in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister is particularly well suited to presenting the artist dynasties Brueg(h)el, Van Balen and Francken and their collaboration in a special exhibition. Major works and high-quality workshop pieces are brought together in the exhibition to form a “school of seeing” and placed in relation to one another. The aim is to focus on the way in which the workshops, usually run over several generations and employing many employees, interact with each other. Numerous different strategies of work creation and collaboration between artists and workshops can be observed. Some outstanding major works by the respective artist dynasties will be loaned from other collections.
Hendrick van Balen I and Jan Brueghel I (workshop), The Wedding Feast of Bacchus and Ariadne, ca. 1606/07, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister
Extensive technical studies of the group of around 45 paintings as well as some remarkable restorations allow new insights into the creation process of the paintings, which were often created jointly by two or three artists, and into questions of stylistic transformations and changes of motif. The exceptionally high quality of this Dresden group of paintings offers exemplary insights into their artistic genesis and simultaneously sharpens our understanding of the economic, social and religious backgrounds of these production strategies.
Parallel to the exhibition, a scientific inventory catalogue on the Brueghel, Van Balen, and Francken artist group in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister will be published.