XV - Works On Paper - Marty de Cambiaire (English)

Jacob Jordaens
Antwerp 1593 – 1678
7
Mercury Standing, Seen from Behind
Black and red chalk, sepia wash, heightened with white
Inscribed C at upper left and Rubens at lower right
464 x 283 mm (18 1 /4 x 11 2 /8 in.)
PROVENANCE
Sale Paris, Drouot, 4 May 1933, lot 87, illustrated;
sale Paris, Drouot, 4 February 1972 (uncatalogued);
collection Jacques Petit-Horry, Paris; sale Paris,
Drouot, Audap-Godeau-Solanet, 26 June 1987,
lot 123; sale Amsterdam, Christie’s, 25 November
1992, lot 542; sale Paris, Tajan, 7 April 1995, lot 94;
sale Munich, Hampel, 4 December 2009, lot 25;
collection Bert Quadvlieg, The Netherlands, until
2018.
LITERATURE
Chantelou, “Au fil des Ventes. Comestibles et
vénéneux”, Le Monde, 8 March 1972, p. 17; R.A.
d’Hulst, Jordaens Drawings, Bruxelles, 1974, vol.
I, p. 147-148, cat. A53, vol. III, no. 60, illustrated;
Galerie Claude Aubry, Dessins des Ecoles du Nord
dans les collections privées françaises, Paris, 1974,
cat. 57, pl. 59, illustrated; R.A. d’Hulst, “Jordaens
Drawings, Supplement I”, Master Drawings,
18, 1980, 3, p. 363, Fig. 3; H. Oursel, Donation
d’Antoine Brasseur, exhibition catalogue (Lille,
Musée des Beaux-Arts, 8 May – 27 September
1981), Lille, 1981, p. 82.
master who occasionally engaged him. A prolific
painter, also highly diverse in his choices, and head
of an important workshop, Jordaens became even
more active after the death of Rubens in 1640,
receiving commissions from religious authorities as
well as from European royalty, including Charles I
of England, Christina of Sweden, and the widow of
prince Frederic Henry of Orange Amalia van Solms.
His commissions for private collectors were also
large in number and diverse, as well as his drawings
which constituted an immense repertory of shapes
and ideas that he often returned to in order to
animate his large-scale mythological, allegorical
and religious compositions.
Of a rather carnal aspect, this Mercury seen from
behind seems to have been inspired by a sculpture,
as indicated by a circular rapidly sketched base. In
fact, a statuette in ivory once in Rubens’s collection
was described in the inventory drawn up upon his
EXHIBITED
Paris, Galerie Claude Aubry, 8 May – 1 June 1974.
Requested for the forthcoming exhibition Designed
by Rubens, to be held in the Rubenshuis, Antwerp,
and other venues in Spring 2021.
A pupil and the son-in-law of Adam van Noort, Jacob
Jordaens was one of the major representatives of
baroque painting in Antwerp, together with Rubens
and van Dyck. A member of the guild of Saint Luke
in Antwerp, he spent almost his entire career in this
city except for short voyages. He never travelled to
Italy but studied Venetian artists through the prints
and copies in his possession, as well as Caravaggio’s
original Madonna of the Rosary in the Antwerp
Dominican church (today the church of Saint Paul).
He was never Rubens’s pupil in the strict sense of
the word but did not escape the influence of the
Fig. 1 Attributed to A. Quellinus The Elder, Mercury,
ivory, Saint-Petersburg, The Hermitage Museum.
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