Flemish landscape painter who settled in England in the early 1670s. His landscapes are somewhat Rubensian, but he is best known for his “portraits” of English country houses, done in a simple, rather archaic manner; two views of Longleat, Wiltshire (1675 and 1676), are still preserved in the house. He was the first professional exponent of the genre.
In Flemish genre painting the representation of country life remained somewhat conventional. The exceptionally vigorous naturalism with which Jan Siberechts rendered landscapes and peasants makes one think of Courbet.
Even in its later period, Flemish landscape painting retains the main distinguishing characteristics that emerged as early· as the 16th century in the works of such atrists as Pieter Brueghel and Momper.
This painting shows a sweeping view from a slightly elevated position, sloping down over the cattle pastures in the foreground towards a river plied by a cargo boat on the left and with a village on its banks to the right. Towards the background, the terrain slopes upwards again, with fields under changing sunlight and clouds, and a double rainbow in the sky. On the left, the view broadens out into the background towards the hills on the horizon.
A Dutch landscape painting, for example by Ruisdael, could hardly be described in this manner. Unlike Flemish landscape paintings. their Dutch counterparts rarely include so many different and contrasting elements. Here, we have proximity and distance, hill and plain, animals, people, boats and houses. While Flemish landscapes frequently have a universal theme, Dutch landscapes tend to concentrate on a single aspect. This painting is typical of the later work of Sibcrechts, who emigrated to England in1672. Whereas his Flemish landscapes generally portray a small detail, his later work is topographically more precise; on the right we can recognize the village of Henley-on-Thames.
Jan Siberechts arrived in England from Flanders in 1673, under the aegis of George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, and at once attracted notable patrons, no doubt owing to his well-established reputation among the Flemish elite.
The present pastoral landscape with a shepherdess on a donkey carrying a basket of flowers, and fording a stream with a village in the distance and with a church, was painted in Derbyshire. The church is almost certainly represents Edensor, near the grounds of Chatsworth. Though the structure which would have been known to Siberechts was torn down in the 19th century for a larger Victorian structure, a circa 1860 photo of the church in its original form does strongly resemble the painted structure shown here.
The detail shows a shepherdess on a donkey carrying a basket of flowers, and fording a stream.
This painting is a tribute to the fertility and the ease of summer. One milkmaid is bathing at the water’s edge while another follows her cattle through the ford. There may well be some sort of in-joke between the classical stance of this woman, elegantly balancing her milk can on her head, and the pissing cow at her side. A lovely grove to the upper right shelters grazing horses and cattle.
Signed at bottom left: J. Siberechts en. anvers. 1672
The painters of the Netherlands have always found in their own countryside an almost inexhaustible treasury of themes. Fertile fenland stretching into the distance, carefully maintained farmsteads, fords, meandering lanes with carts stuck in the mud, bluish waterfronts - these are the motifs repeatedly found in the works of Jan Siberechts, one of the most popular of the Flemish landscape painters. And these landscapes are peopled with figures closely associated with the toil of the land: a buxom country woman sits on a milking stool in front of a barn, a girl with her skirt tucked up drives a cart across a ford, a young herdsman rests while his flock grazes. In these contemplative paintings the mood is gentle; their appeal lies in the sparse arrangement of the motifs, the harmonious structure and bluish-grey colouring.
In this picture, with its low horizon, light plays a very important role in connecting the foreground with the depths of the picture. It conveys movement and change and creates a feeling of harmony between man, beast and landscape.
The dynamic, cosmic vision in the tradition of Rubens is absent from Jan Siberechts’ The Ford. The artist was seduced by Dutch landscape art with its lightness of touch, and clear, impressionistic atmosphere. Siberechts’ vaguely erotic paintings have, however, a certain solidity of form and evenness of execution.
A farmyard in front of a well-appointed farmhouse, which rises up centrally in the background, with to the right a well and a small barn, and to the left in the distance a vegetable garden and a rural hamlet around a church, all set the scene for the busy occupations of the countryfolk in the foreground. Three women are preparing their vegetable harvest for market, assisted in the right background by a waggoner and watched on the left by a friendly-looking dog and a maid with a milking pail on her head and a pot with a handle in her hand. Behind her a peasant woman is letting cattle out of the barn whilst a lad is driving towards the herd a couple of sheep that have strayed into this attractive tableau, producing a light-hearted anecdote that links the various planes.
The motif of the poster announcing the sale of the farm introduces a hint of uncertainty and of impending doom. Even so, the general impression of Siberechts’ composition is that of an undisturbable natural order and rural calm. In doing so he touches a sensitive chord with the modern city-dweller. Country life already exercised a particular attraction on the painter’s contemporaries, leading to the building of many country houses away from the cities. The dignity with which the country-folk are depicted is typical of Siberechts. There is no longer any hint of “boorish” behaviour - a proverbial term for the low appreciation in which a civilised bourgeoisie held country people and which expressed its dislike in many a vituperative tableau.
Siberechts’ noble peasants are often compared with those of France’s Le Nain brothers. Possibly Siberechts drew inspiration for his noble portrayal from Brussels painter Michael Sweerts. For the motifs, such as the milkmaid carrying her heavy pail on her head, the reader is referred to her counterpart in Rubens’ late landscapes. When it comes to the sculptural stateliness of Siberecht’s figures, we should not forget that his father was a sculptor. This painting, the theme of which departs from his more usual “Landscapes with Fords”, came into being in his Antwerp period, before the artist entered the service of the English aristocracy. An analogous work, the Farmyard, dated from 1662, is also conserved in the Brussels museum.
Siberechts is known mainly as a landscape painter, the present genre painting is one of the few exceptions in his oeuvre.
This painting depicts a wooded landscape with peasants in a horse-drawn cart travelling down a flooded road.
