BLOEMAERT, Abraham

The verso of the sheet contains a depiction of two cottages.

The Catholic painter Abraham, resident in predominantly Catholic Utrecht, painted spectacular altarpieces in the style reminiscent of sixteenth-century Italian painting. He painted this altarpiece, one of his largest, for the church of the Catholic order of the Jesuits in Brussels, in the Southern Netherlands. Such commissions were extremely rare in the Dutch Republic. Bloemaert’s jubilant colour and festive pageantry befitted the theme and answered the Jesuit’s need for a lively backdrop to their main altar.

Bloemaert settled in Utrecht in 1593, and within a decade began to adopt the mild classicism that Goltzius had brought back from Italy. Utrecht was the leading Catholic centre in the northern Netherlands during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and even during the seventeenth century, when Catholicism was suppressed, it continued to keep something of its Catholic character. Bloemaert, a devout Catholic, received commissions for large altarpieces from patrons in both the northern and southern Netherlands, and many of his more than 600 prints were intended for a Catholic clientele.

Niobe was the daughter of the proud King Tantalus of Phrygia. She married Amphion, the king of Thebes, and bore him seven sons and seven daughters. She bragged of her many children and chided the goddess Latona, mother of the twins Apollo and Diana, for having only two. In vengeance, Apollo and Diana carried out a massacre. They are shown in the clouds showering arrows down onto Niobe’s children.

The painting, in which the young Bloemaert followed the model of the Haarlem Mannerist painter Cornelis van Haarlem, was originally intended for Emperor Rudolph II in Prague, a patron of many Mannerist artists.

This rare subject was taken from the Aethiopica, a Greek novel of A.D. 240 written by a Phoenician, Heliodorus, and devoted to an Ethiopian adventure that takes place in the Nile Delta. Attacked by pirates (at the upper right), the heroine, the Grecian maiden Charikleia, kneels over her wounded mate Theagenes. In realizing the figures, Bloemaert followed Venetian models, but the landscape style and sophisticated colours are his own.

Bloemaert introduced a new theme into Northern Netherlandish art by the depiction of farmhouses. He drew these sheets partly after life, around Utrecht.

This is a pure landscape without narrative, rare within Bloemaert’s oeuvre. It shows a dovecote - or a structure that holds doves and pigeons - towers over a bucolic farmyard, and its solid structure pleasingly contrasts with an undulating landscape below and billowing clouds behind it.

This sheet from a drawing book contains figure studies after Abraham Bloemaert, the father of Frederick.

During the 1610s Bloemaert became increasingly engrossed in observing the world surrounding him. This manifested in every subject he turned to but the most obviously so in his sketches of human figures, his genre scenes and his depictions of animals. Animals observed with extraordinarily meticulous care are rendered true to life in his drawings of the countryside and rural life but they also can be found in his biblical and mythological scenes as well as in his various allegories and single figure studies. A few dozen of his depictions featuring one or more domestic animals or birds have also survived. Engravers, who were in many cases also publishers, compiled series from these drawings since this made them easier to sell to collectors.

The artist’s son, Frederick Bloemaert executed a series of fourteen sheets featuring birds and domestic animals after Abraham Bloemaert’s drawings.

This engraving is the eighth sheet of a series of fourteen sheets, featuring birds and domestic animals. The engraving was made after a drawing by Frederick’s father, Abraham Bloemaert.

Bloemaert lived to the age of almost ninety. He was a contemporary of Rembrandt and yet he belonged to the generation of Rembrandt’s teachers. He was the leading representative of the Utrecht Mannerists and the director and founder of the Utrecht Guild of St Luke, but he continued to work well into the Baroque I7th century when a third generation of landscape painters was already emerging.

His peasant landscape contains certain Mannerist elements such as the large distance between the foreground objects and the sweeping horizon, or in the way in which he has united contrasts. The aspects of Bloemaert’s work adopted by Dutch landscape painters are the picturesque elements evident in his rendering of nature and architecture. The picturesque appeal of dilapidated cottages, damaged thatching, broken fences and rotten tree trunks were to become part and parcel of Netherlandish landscape painting.

Bloemaert’s oeuvre also forges a link between Flemish and Dutch painting. While his portrayals of mythological themes and biblical tales lean heavily on the syntax of the international Flemish Mannerists, the dramatic realism of his rural genre paintings influenced the Dutch artists.

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Johann Sebastian Bach: Cantata BWV 212 (Bauernkantate)

This painting typifies the transition from the mannered, narrative landscape paintings of the 16th century to the true-to-life observations of the 17th-century landscape painters.

In this painting the landscape functions as the setting of a biblical story. The key figure is the little man with horns lurking in the background: the devil who sows tares among the wheat while the peasants are asleep (Matthew 13:25).

This painting with a graceful young woman in the centre, shows a frenzied eroticism. The density of the composition, with its balletic interplay of poses and gestures, is in the spirit of Joachim Wtewael, Bloemaert’s contemporary in Utrecht. The composition is an original invention inspired by an eclectic survey of recent Dutch Mannerist forms.

The age of the sitter (47) is inscribed upper right.

The symbolism of Christ and Christians as shepherd and sheep is founded on the parables of Luke (15:3-7) and John (10:1-18). Its translation into visual terms is largely confined to early Christian art. It is rarely encountered in painting after the Middle Ages. The shepherd became element of pastoral scenes.

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Franz Schubert: Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (The Shepherd on the Rock) D 965

Fortified by a religious tradition reaching back to the Middle Ages, a large Catholic community continued to exist at Utrecht inside the primarily Protestant Northern Low Countries of the 16th and 17th centuries. Although officially banned, the Catholic cult was tolerated there away from public view. Abraham Bloemaert, himself a devout Catholic, set up shop in Utrecht in 1593, remaining there till his death.

For a short period the painter experimented with the possibilities offered by new artistic models from Italy, which he got to know indirectly via the material that his pupils Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerrit van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen brought back from their study trips there. This group was influenced in particular by Caravaggio, in terms both of subject and style. Bloemaert combines the key features of this style in The Emmaus Disciples, a painting that forms a high point not only in his own career, but also in that of the school of the Utrecht Caravaggists in general, with the large, half length figures, the individualised figures with a strong sense of emotionality and in particular the use of chiaroscuro, with strong light-dark effects and sharp shadows, produced by introducing a source of minimum light, here two separate, smoking candles. This style was untypical for the Northern Provinces, where a tendency towards the intimate is so clearly visible in almost all other contemporary genres.

The tableau presents the biblical scene in which Jesus - in a gesture that refers back to the Last Supper - breaks bread and in so doing confirms his resurrection from the dead to two of his disciples, who had not recognised him until then (Luke 24, 13-35). Two figures in the background represent the same two disciples, despairingly consulting with each other on the road to the village of Emmaus, before meeting the “stranger” who was to open their eyes for good. The visible emotional reactions which the revelation causes to the protagonists are seemingly totally lost on a fourth individual, a turbaned server. In terms of content and form this painting represents “a light shining in the darkness”.

The biblical story (Genesis, chapter 21) depicted in the paintings is the following. Hagar, the Egyptian hand maiden of Sarah was the mother of Ishmael, Abraham’s first son. When Isaac, Sarah’s son, was born Ishmael mocked his younger brother so that Sarah asked Abraham to banish him, together with his mother. Abraham provided them with bread and a bottle of water and sent them off into the desert of Beersheba.

The biblical aspect in the painting is not the central focus of the painting, typically of Bloemaert’s mature work. The viewer’s first impression is that this is a genre scene of a contemporary farmyard.

Bloemaert’s religious output was considerable, as he received numerous commissions from the Catholic circles that predominated in the city of Utrecht and he himself professed the Catholic faith. The work depicts the theme of the rest on the Flight into Egypt (Matthew 2:13-15) and shows the Virgin with the Child and St Joseph in the shade of a leafy tree and surrounded by kneeling angels that worship and appear to protect the Holy Family. The landscape is reduced to the monumental tree, the main feature of the scene, and a luminous sky in which angels and cherubim flutter in varied postures. The combination of the Gospel theme of the Flight into Egypt and the devotional image of the Mother suckling the Child was created by Flemish painters of the 15th century, and there are known examples by G�rard David and Joachim Patenier.

During his initial period Bloemaert painted whimsical forms and adopted the cold palette of the Haarlem Mannerists and of the school of Fontainebleau, with whose style he may have come into contact during his stay in France in the 1580s. But in the first decade of the 17th century his style evolved towards a calmer and more delicate language and a concern for the beauty of figures, chromatic harmony and luminosity. These qualities are found in the present painting, in which the figures have an endearing, gentle appearance that recalls the art of Italian painters like Correggio and Barocci, whom the artist followed chiefly through engravings. A further factor related to this development is the influence of the tempered classicism that was imported from Italy by Goltzius and which Bloemaert espoused, as may be seen in this work, before shifting in 1620 towards the tenebrist naturalism of Caravaggio, which he learned from his own pupils, among them Van Honthorst.

The subject marks the climax of the story of Cupid and Psyche as recounted by Apuleius in The Golden Ass (Books 4-6). The theme became popular with artists during the Renaissance and was also frequently depicted in the seventeenth century. The marriage of Cupid and Psyche took place in heaven on Mount Olympus after Psyche had endeavoured in vain to win back Cupid’s love on earth by a series of ordeals set by Venus. The chief protagonists in this banquet of the gods are seated facing the viewer in the centre of the composition. Venus and Mars embrace with Vulcan to the left and Bacchus to the right. The immediate foreground is dominated by Neptune and Mercury, who conveyed Psyche to heaven in order for her to be reunited with Cupid. Jupiter and Juno are set further back in the picture space on the far right. Apollo, holding a lyre, can be faintly discerned top left, while Fame accompanied by putti blows a fanfare. The story of Cupid and Psyche was not always depicted simply as a narrative, but sometimes in broad philosophical terms as an allegory of carnal and spiritual love.

The composition of the painting is inspired by a large engraving of the Marriage of Cupid and Psyche by Hendrik Goltzius, made after a drawing of 1587 by Bartholomeus Spranger. The rectangular format of the engraving was favoured by Bloemaert for another version of the subject now at Aschaffenburg, Bavaria. This compositional dependency on Spranger’s work is echoed in the similarity of style, which in turn suggests an early date of about 1595 for the painting. Bloemaert here provides a perfect demonstration of Mannerism in the complicated twisting poses, the severe foreshortening, the restless movement, and the dramatic gesticulation. These stylistic tendencies are given an added visual complexity by the circular format that was also often used by Goltzius for his prints of mythological subjects.

The painting formed part of a large group of pictures sold by the dealer William Frizell to Charles II in 1660. Of these, eleven were claimed by Frizell to have been in the collections of Rudolf II in Prague and Queen Christina of Sweden, including the present picture. However, no such painting seems to have been listed in the inventories of the collections of either of these famous patrons of the arts and so Frizell’s claim remains unconfirmed.

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Francesco Gasparini: The Meddlesome Cupid, aria

The subject of this painting was very popular in the Netherlands among Protestants and Catholics alike in the closing years of the 16th century. This canvas, with its colourful figures, is the most impressive of the versions that the Catholic Bloemaert painted of the subject. One striking feature is the prominence given to the landscape, which is in a wholly Flemish style.

The recto of the sheet contains the depiction of a cottage.

The tale of Venus and Adonis is related in the ancient poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Here the goddess Venus tries in vain to persuade her mortal lover Adonis to refrain from taking part in the dangerous hunt, but in the background we see Adonis having been slain during the hunt.

This painting is regarded as one of Bloemaert’s masterpieces. The harmony, the intensity of the colours, and the lustre of the classical figures against the contrasting landscape behind it testifies to the quality and longevity. In creating the composition, Bloemaert could look for inspiration in great artists such as Titian and Rubens, who had already painted the motif.

Pomona, the classical goddess of fruit, and Vertumnus, the god of transformation, are the main figures in an episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses which is depicted here. Vertumnus enters Pomona’s grove in order to convince her of his love. Because she had always run away on previous occasions when he came, he has cunningly dressed as an old woman on this occasion. By telling her about the allegory of the grapevine and elm, he is able to convince her of the importance of togetherness, for the grapevine needs something it can climb up and the elm, when considered on its own, is useless. Persuaded, Pomona gives in to love and her innermost longings and they become a couple.

This is the last, largest and most accomplished of Bloemaert’s treatments of this Ovidian subject, in which his earlier Mannerist traits have all but disappeared, to be replaced with a monumental classicism. The painting is signed and dated upper right: A.Bloemaert fc: / 1620.

Bloemaert not only painted altarpieces in Utrecht, the centre of Catholicism in the Northern Netherlands, but also made drawings for series of engravings of religious subjects. His series of six drawings, The Sinners of the Old and New Testaments, was transferred to copper plate by Willem van Swanenburg. The present depiction of Zacchaeus might have been a quickly sketched first version of the theme, not a direct preliminary drawing.