THOMAS VAN YPEREN, Jan

Jan Thomas van Yperen was accepted as a master by the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke in 1639-40. He is thought to have worked in the studio of Peter Paul Rubens before copying and amending paintings by Rubens in his house following the master’s death in 1640. Van Yperen resettled in Vienna in around ¹⁶⁵⁶⁄₅₈, where he worked for Emperor Leopold I and Archduke Leopold William.

Alongside large format religious histories, he also painted numerous landscapes with pastoral or mythological scenes. His proximity to the style of Peter Paul Rubens is typical of van Yperen’s oeuvre, and highly evident in the present work. Pastoral motifs - that is, idyllic scenes of shepherds and romanticised countryside subjects such as grazing animals - were already used in the murals of antiquity, and later experienced their apogee in the art of the Baroque and ensuing Rococo periods.

In the 1650s Thomas van Yperen left Antwerp for the German-speaking regions; in 1656 he finally settled in Vienna, where he painted several religious scenes in a classicist style vaguely reminiscent of Rubens. The same style characterized his cabinet-size history pictures, also produced in Vienna, as for example, his Bacchanal.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 7 minutes):

Camille Saint-Saëns: Samson et Delila, Act III, Scene 2, Bacchanal

In the 1650s Thomas van Yperen left Antwerp for the German-speaking regions; in 1656 he finally settled in Vienna, where he painted several religious scenes in a classicist style vaguely reminiscent of Rubens.

Besides working on many paintings for the emperor in Vienna, Thomas received commissions from a number of Hungarian aristocrats. One of the most important of these is the half-length portrait of Mikl�s Zrinyi (1620-1664), the famous military leader, statesman and poet.

Several small mythological and allegorical compositions executed in the 1640s can be ascribed to Thomas van Yperen, who became master in Antwerp in 1639-40. Both in their fluent pictorial nature and in the tensely emotive figures in their landscape setting, his paintings are unthinkable without the influence of the work of Rubens’s last period.