17th century
Flemish Baroque
Flemish Baroque was the school of painting that flourished in Antwerp and the Southern Netherlands between about 1585 and 1700, led by Rubens and van Dyck.
Schools of the 1600s
Flemish Baroque Paintings in Our Collection
The Samaritan Woman, 1600sMore from this school
Concert of Putti, late 1600s
The Fire of Sodom, circa 1600
Adoration of the Magi, 1600s
Rest on the Flight, late 1600sWhat the copying of a famous composition actually was, and what a canvas made that way is, is set out in our guide to period copies after the Old Masters.
- 1585 Fall of Antwerp
- 1608 Rubens returns from Italy
Antwerp After the Storm
Flemish Baroque painting flourished in the Southern Netherlands, roughly from 1585 to 1700, after the region returned to Habsburg and Catholic rule. Antwerp, though wounded by war and the closing of its river trade, remained one of Europe's great artistic capitals. The Counter-Reformation Church, the Spanish court and a prosperous merchant class all demanded pictures, and the city's workshops answered with an energy that defined an era.
- 1632 Van Dyck court painter in London
- 1640 Death of Rubens
A Workshop Culture
The school's towering figure was Peter Paul Rubens, 1577 to 1640, whose studio organised painting on an industrial scale and whose dynamic compositions, rich colour and confident flesh became the Baroque standard north of the Alps. Anthony van Dyck carried the manner into portraiture, refining it for the courts of Europe. Around them worked brilliant specialists. Frans Snyders and Paul de Vos in animal painting and the hunt, Jan Brueghel in flowers and landscape, David Teniers in peasant scenes. Collaboration between specialists on a single canvas was standard practice, a workshop culture unique to Antwerp.
- 1678 Death of Paul de Vos
Leadership Passes to France
By 1700 the great generation was gone and artistic leadership had passed to France. Yet Flemish Baroque painting never left the walls of Europe's collections, and its influence runs through Watteau, Delacroix and the entire Romantic rediscovery of colour. The Antwerp workshops produced abundantly, and their compositions were copied and adapted for two more centuries, which is why works from and after this school are still found today.
Rubens once told a buyer exactly which of his pictures he had painted himself.
In 1618 he offered a group of paintings to Sir Dudley Carleton, the English ambassador at The Hague, with a list. Some were entirely by his own hand. Others, in his words, were made by the best of his pupils and the whole retouched by his hand. Four centuries later, "workshop of" and "circle of" on a Flemish panel answer the same question.
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