Tobias Verhaecht [1] (1561–1631) was a painter from Antwerp in the Duchy of Brabant who primarily painted landscapes. His style was indebted to the mannerist world landscape developed by artists like Joachim Patinir and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. He was the first teacher of Pieter Paul Rubens. [2]
Tobias Verhaecht was born in Antwerp as the son of Cornelis van Haecht. His father must also have been an artist as Verhaecht was admitted to the Antwerp Guild of St Luke as the son of a master. [3]
It is not recorded with whom he studied. Before 1590 he travelled to Italy and first worked in Florence where Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany was his patron. He then moved on to Rome where he was active as a painter of landscape frescos. [4] He returned to Antwerp where he became a master of the Guild of St. Luke in 1590–91.
Not long after he married Suzanna van Mockenborch, who was the granddaughter of Peter Paul Rubens' stepfather Jan de Landmetere, and a cousin of his mother. [5] The couple had two sons Cornelis and Willem and one daughter Suzanna. His wife died in 1595 after the birth of their daughter. This happened during a difficult financial period for Verhaecht when he had also been appointed deacon of the Guild. [3]
The year following the death of his first wife, he married Esther Pamphi, whose sister Maria married the battle painter Sebastiaen Vrancx. The couple had one more son and daughter. His second wife died in 1612. Verhaecht suffered more family drama with the death of his first-born Cornelis in 1614 and of his daughter Suzanna in 1623. [3]
Verhaecht was a member of the Violieren, a local Chamber of rhetoric connected to the Antwerp Guild of St Luke for which he wrote a comedy in 1620. [4]
He was the first teacher of Rubens who studied with him around 1592 for about two years but left because his interest was history painting and not landscape. His other pupils included his son Willem van Haecht, Jacques Backereel, Marten Ryckaert, Geeraert van Beemel, Adriaen Daep, Leonhard Cemp, Cornelis Bol, Pieter van den Hoeck and Abraham Matthys. [6]
The artist died in Antwerp in 1631. [6]
Tobias Verhaecht specialized in landscapes and also produced several versions of the Tower of Babel. His landscapes followed the traditional style of the world landscape, which had first been developed in the first half of the 16th century by Joachim Patinir and had reached its peak with Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The landscapes depict imaginary mountains characterized by rocky peaks seen from a high viewpoint and typically including a religious or mythological scene. [4] These landscapes often include villages and figures dwarfed by their surroundings rendered in meticulous detail. [7]
His work closely resembles in style the set of 12 large prints published by Hieronymus Cock after designs by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which are referred to by art historians as the Large Landscapes. [4] The earliest works of Verhaecht are clearly conservative in style. The steep and bizarre rock formations and the strange atmosphere are indebted to Joachim Patinir, who was already dead for three-quarters of a century when Verhaecht started to create these works. Verhaecht shows in these works that the evolution of landscape painting during the second half of the sixteenth century had largely passed him by. In the 1620s and 1630s he painted panoramic landscapes with a high horizon and using the traditional three-color plan. He was thus still working in the fantastic landscape tradition at a time when Jan Brueghel the Elder was painting casual village landscapes, and his former pupil Rubens had realized some beautiful atmospheric landscapes. [8] Verhaecht's landscapes were not entirely oblivious of the work of Josse de Momper and Gillis van Coninxloo who were evolving towards a more close-up and realist approach and he adopted some of the elements of the new approach. [4]
He collaborated with other local painters such as Jan Brueghel the Elder, Frans Francken the Younger, Sebastian Vrancx and Gillis Coignet who painted the figures in his paintings. Some of Verhaecht's landscapes were made into prints. [4]
Jan Brueghelthe Elder was a Flemish painter and draughtsman. He was the son of the eminent Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. A close friend and frequent collaborator with Peter Paul Rubens, the two artists were the leading Flemish painters in the first three decades of the 17th century.
Jan Brueghelthe Younger was a Flemish Baroque painter. He was the son of Jan Brueghel the Elder, and grandson of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, both prominent painters who contributed respectively to the development of Renaissance and Baroque painting in the Southern Netherlands. Taking over his father's workshop at an early age, he painted the same subjects as his father in a style which was similar to that of his father. He regularly collaborated with leading Flemish painters of his time.
Esaias van de Velde was a Dutch landscape painter.
Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting represents the 16th-century response to Italian Renaissance art in the Low Countries. These artists, who span from the Antwerp Mannerists and Hieronymus Bosch at the start of the 16th century to the late Northern Mannerists such as Hendrik Goltzius and Joachim Wtewael at the end, drew on both the recent innovations of Italian painting and the local traditions of the Early Netherlandish artists. Antwerp was the most important artistic centre in the region. Many artists worked for European courts, including Bosch, whose fantastic painted images left a long legacy. Jan Mabuse, Maarten van Heemskerck and Frans Floris were all instrumental in adopting Italian models and incorporating them into their own artistic language. Pieter Brueghel the Elder, with Bosch the only artist from the period to remain widely familiar, may seem atypical, but in fact his many innovations drew on the fertile artistic scene in Antwerp.
Joos de Momper the Younger or Joost de Momper the Younger was a Flemish landscape painter active in Antwerp between the late 16th century and the early 17th century. Brueghel's influence is clearly evident in many of de Momper's paintings. His work is situated at the transition from late 16th-century Mannerism to the greater realism in landscape painting that developed in the early 17th century. He achieved considerable success during his lifetime.
The Antwerp School was a school of artists active in Antwerp, first during the 16th century when the city was the economic center of the Low Countries, and then during the 17th century when it became the artistic stronghold of the Flemish Baroque under Peter Paul Rubens.
Sebastiaen Vrancx, Sebastiaan Vrancx or Sebastian Vranckx was a Flemish Baroque painter and draughtsman who is mainly known for his battle scenes, a genre that he pioneered in Netherlandish painting. He also created landscapes with mythological and allegorical scenes, scenes with robbers, village scenes and celebrations in cities. He was a gifted figure painter who was regularly invited to paint the staffage in compositions of fellow painters.
Flemish Baroque painting refers to the art produced in the Southern Netherlands during Spanish control in the 16th and 17th centuries. The period roughly begins when the Dutch Republic was split from the Habsburg Spain regions to the south with the Spanish recapturing of Antwerp in 1585 and goes until about 1700, when Spanish Habsburg authority ended with the death of King Charles II. Antwerp, home to the prominent artists Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and Jacob Jordaens, was the artistic nexus, while other notable cities include Brussels and Ghent.
Frans Francken the Younger was a Flemish painter and the best-known member of the large Francken family of artists. Francken created altarpieces and painted furniture panels, but his reputation chiefly rests on his small and delicate cabinet pictures with historical, mythological, or allegorical themes. He played an important role in the development of Flemish art in the first half of the 17th century through his innovations in many genres including genre painting and his introduction of new subject matter. He was a frequent collaborator of leading Antwerp painters of his time.
Willem van Haecht was a Flemish painter best known for his pictures of art galleries and collections.
Jan Wildens was a Flemish painter and draughtsman specializing in landscapes. His Realist landscapes show an eye for detail and have a serene character. He was a regular collaborator with Rubens and other leading Flemish Baroque painters of his generation in whose compositions he painted the landscapes.
Ambrosius Brueghel was a Flemish painter from the famous Brueghel family of artists. Less prolific and less well-known than a number of his family members, his oeuvre is not very well understood and is believed to comprise Baroque still lifes, garland paintings as well as landscapes.
Matthijs Musson was a painter and art dealer based in Antwerp, who played an important role in popularizing artists of the 17th-century Antwerp school by marketing them throughout Europe.
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Cornelis van Dalem was a Flemish painter and draughtsman active in Antwerp in the middle of the 16th century and an important contributor to the development of landscape art in the Low Countries. Van Dalem introduced into landscape painting new themes, which he derived from his humanistic education, and searched for new ways of representing his themes.
The world landscape, a translation of the German Weltlandschaft, is a type of composition in Western painting showing an imaginary panoramic landscape seen from an elevated viewpoint that includes mountains and lowlands, water, and buildings. The subject of each painting is usually a Biblical or historical narrative, but the figures comprising this narrative element are dwarfed by their surroundings.
Cornelis Massijs, was a Flemish Renaissance painter, draughtsman and engraver, mainly known for his landscapes and, to a lesser extent, genre scenes and portraits. He is regarded as an important figure in the transition from the fantastic landscapes of Joachim Patinir to the 'pure landscapes' of later Netherlandish landscape painting.
The Brueghel family, also spelled Bruegel or Breughel, is an extended family of Dutch and Flemish painters which played a major role in the development of the art in Brabant and Flanders throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. Due to the organisation in guilds and training being done with established painters and not in schools or academies, painters often passed on the knowledge from father to son, and there are many examples of Flemish painting families spanning two or more generations, e.g. the Francken family, which had at least ten painters spanning four generations. The Brueghel family produced the largest number of major painters of all Flemish families.
Alpine Landscape is an oil on canvas painting by Flemish painter Tobias Verhaecht. The painting was completed between 1600 and 1615, and is now in the Museum of Prado in Madrid.
Landscape with Venus and Adonis is an oil on canvas painting by Flemish painter Tobias Verhaecht. The work was probably painted in the 1600s, and is now in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid.
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