VENNE, Jan van de
Flemish painter, also known as Pseudo-Van der Venne because he used to be wrongly thought of as the brother of the better known Dutch painter Adriaen van de Venne. In 1616 he is recorded as a Master in the Painter’s Guild of Saint Luc in Brussels.
He was a painter of genre scenes and also of religious subjects. He specialised in caricatured, so-called ‘low-life’ subjects, such as card-players, tooth-pullers and musicians, and in expressive religious scenes. His love for brownish tonalities and the choice of his themes are related to contemporary Dutch painters as Adriaen Brouwer and Adriaen van Ostade, or Benjamin Cuyp and Andries Both.
Very few of his paintings are signed, but based on the signed or documented works it was very easy to attribute the unsigned ones, seeing the very specific style, subjects, use of light and brilliancy of Jan van de Venne.
Van der Venne had important patrons, amongst them the Cardinal Infant Ferdinand and Archduke Leopold Wilhelm.
Because he regularly painted Gipsies he is also known as ‘le Maître des Tziganes’ in France, where many museums hold his paintings (Aix-en Provence, Auxerre, Besançon, Chambéry, Dijon, Dunkirk, Hazebrouck, Lille, Marseille, Paris-Louvre, Quimper and Semur-en-Auxois).
