Flemish Baroque
To view our Flemish and Dutch School paintings
Part of our Art Movements & Schools series. Read the full biography of Paul de Vos in our Artist Directory.
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. Its workshops of brilliant specialists defined the Baroque north of the Alps and supplied churches, courts and collectors across Europe.
Origins: 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.
Origins (1585-1608) · The Age of Rubens (1608-1660s) · The Long Afterglow (1660s-1700)
The Movement at Its Height
The school's towering figure was Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), whose studio organized painting on an industrial scale and whose dynamic compositions, rich color 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 (1591-1678) 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.
Decline and Legacy
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 color. Because the Antwerp workshops produced abundantly, and because their compositions were copied and adapted for two more centuries, works from and after this school remain among the most rewarding fields for collectors of Old Masters.
Flemish Baroque in Our Collection
GalerieClub regularly offers Flemish Old Master paintings on panel and canvas, including works from the circles and followers of Snyders and van Dyck, biblical scenes in the Antwerp manner, and animal pieces in the tradition of Paul de Vos, the painter of the King of Spain's hunting lodge.
