Jacob Jordaens

Flemish·1593–1678

96 paintings in our database

Jordaens inherited Rubens's position as the leading painter in Antwerp and completed several of Rubens's unfinished commissions, making him essential to the continuity of the Flemish Baroque tradition. These works combine the moralizing proverb tradition of Bruegel with Rubens's painterly richness, creating a distinctively Jordaensian combination of didactic content and sensory pleasure.

Biography

Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678) was born in Antwerp and trained under Adam van Noort, the same master who had taught Peter Paul Rubens. He became a master of the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke in 1615 and built one of the most successful painting practices in the city. After the deaths of Rubens (1640) and Van Dyck (1641), Jordaens was regarded as the leading painter in Flanders.

Jordaens's art is characterized by a robust earthiness and warm vitality that distinguish it from the aristocratic elegance of Rubens and Van Dyck. His large-scale compositions — tapestry designs, allegorical paintings, and scenes drawn from proverbs and popular culture — are populated by full-bodied, ruddy-faced figures rendered in a rich, saturated palette. His most famous works include The King Drinks (numerous versions), celebrating the Twelfth Night feast with Rabelaisian exuberance, and As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young, a visual rendering of the Flemish proverb about generations repeating habits.

Despite his Flemish Catholic milieu, Jordaens converted to Calvinism around 1645 — a fact he kept relatively quiet to avoid persecution while continuing to accept Catholic commissions. His later commissions included decorative cycles for the Huis ten Bosch palace in The Hague and large-scale tapestry designs. He ran a large workshop and was extraordinarily prolific, working until near the end of his long life. He died in Antwerp on 18 October 1678.

Artistic Style

Jacob Jordaens was the most prominent painter in Antwerp after Rubens's death in 1640, developing a robust, earthy style that combined Rubens's Baroque energy with a Flemish naturalism rooted in direct observation of everyday life. His figures are full-bodied and vigorously physical — red-faced peasants, buxom women, boisterous children — painted with a fleshy realism that eschews the classical idealization of the Italian tradition. His compositions are crowded and energetic, often pushing figures to the very edges of the canvas, creating a sense of overflowing vitality.

Jordaens's palette is warm and saturated — rich reds, golden yellows, deep greens, and ruddy flesh tones — applied with confident, fluid brushwork that builds form through broad, overlapping strokes. His handling of light is dramatic, frequently employing strong chiaroscuro with warm candlelight or raking daylight that models his substantial figures with convincing three-dimensionality. His textures are varied and tactile: the sheen of satin, the roughness of peasant wool, the softness of infant skin, and the gleam of pewter and glass are all rendered with specificity.

His genre scenes — particularly the many versions of The King Drinks and As the Old Sing, So the Young Pipe — capture Flemish festive life with boisterous humor and unsparing observation. These works combine the moralizing proverb tradition of Bruegel with Rubens's painterly richness, creating a distinctively Jordaensian combination of didactic content and sensory pleasure. His later conversion to Calvinism added a more austere dimension to his work without entirely dampening its physical exuberance.

Historical Significance

Jordaens inherited Rubens's position as the leading painter in Antwerp and completed several of Rubens's unfinished commissions, making him essential to the continuity of the Flemish Baroque tradition. His enormous decorative projects — including paintings for the Huis ten Bosch palace in The Hague and designs for tapestry cycles — demonstrate a capacity for large-scale, complex compositions that maintained Flemish painting's international reputation. His prolific output supplied an international market and kept Antwerp's position as a center of artistic production.

His distinctive combination of Baroque grandeur with earthy, genre-like naturalism influenced Flemish and Dutch painting and contributed to the development of large-scale genre painting as a serious artistic category. His proverb paintings, drawing on Bruegel's tradition, helped maintain the characteristically Netherlandish interest in didactic imagery and popular wisdom. Jordaens's career, spanning over sixty years and encompassing religious, mythological, genre, and decorative painting, represents the full breadth of the Flemish Baroque tradition.

Things You Might Not Know

•Jordaens became the leading painter in Antwerp after both Rubens and Van Dyck died in the early 1640s — he was essentially the last man standing of the great Flemish Baroque generation
•He secretly converted to Calvinism around 1655, which was extraordinarily dangerous in Catholic Antwerp — he continued to accept Catholic commissions while privately practicing his Protestant faith
•He was fined after his death when his Calvinist beliefs were discovered — his body was buried in a Protestant cemetery across the Dutch border rather than in Antwerp
•His paintings are earthier, lustier, and more boisterous than Rubens's — where Rubens elevated his subjects to heroic grandeur, Jordaens kept them firmly rooted in Flemish tavern culture
•He was enormously prolific, producing paintings, tapestry designs, and decorative schemes for clients across Europe — his workshop rivaled Rubens's in output if not in prestige
•His paintings of the Feast of the Bean King, depicting rowdy Epiphany celebrations, are the definitive images of Flemish merrymaking — they capture a specific social tradition with anthropological precision

Influences & Legacy

Shaped By

Peter Paul Rubens — the dominant influence on all Flemish painting, whose dynamic compositions and rich color Jordaens absorbed while maintaining his own earthier character
Caravaggio — whose dramatic lighting and naturalism influenced Jordaens's early works through the broader Caravaggist movement
Adam van Noort — his father-in-law and teacher, who instilled the robust Flemish figure tradition that Jordaens never abandoned
Flemish genre tradition — the culture of festive, earthy scenes of everyday life that distinguishes Jordaens from the more aristocratic Rubens

Went On to Influence

Flemish genre painting — Jordaens's boisterous tavern scenes and festive compositions influenced the tradition of Flemish genre painting into the 18th century
David Teniers the Younger — who continued the tradition of Flemish peasant scenes that Jordaens helped establish
Northern Baroque painting broadly — Jordaens's synthesis of Rubensian grandeur with earthy naturalism influenced painters across the Low Countries
The tradition of feast painting — Jordaens's Epiphany and harvest celebrations established visual conventions for depicting communal festivity