Jan Boeckhorst

Boeckhorst was a versatile painter who produced history paintings on religious and mythological subjects, allegorical works, genre scenes and portraits. Boeckhorst also worked as a designer of cartoons for tapestries. He is known to have designed eight tapestries on the myths of Apollo.[8] The Musée Mont-de-Piété in Bergues preserves 8 preliminary drawings for this Apollo series of tapestries.

Boeckhorst also provided designs for the Antwerp publishers. In the early 1650s he provided several designs for the Breviarium Romanum and 9 border decorations for the Missale Romanum, all engraved by Cornelis Galle the Younger and published by the Plantin Press in Antwerp.[4]

There only exist three signed and dated paintings (dated between 1646 and c. 1660) and five that are dated only from 1659–1666. The first signed painting, a Madonna and Child with Saint John is dated 1646, about 20 years after his arrival in Antwerp. Because of the few number of signed paintings it has been difficult to attribute works to Boeckhorst with certainty and some attributions are contested among art historians.[4]

As was common practice among Antwerp painters, Boeckhorst often collaborated as a figure painter on compositions with landscape painters Jan Wildens and Jan Brueghel the Younger and still life painter Frans Snyders.[9] An example is the Peasants going to the market (Rubenshuis, Antwerp) on which he collaborated with Frans Snyders. This genre scene, which also acts as an allegory of the four elements, is of a monumentally large scale at 217.5 cm in height and 272.5 cm in width.[5] The work shows the influence of Jordaens' genre paintings.[10]

Mercury beholds Herse

Boeckhorst may have collaborated on devotional garland paintings. Garland paintings are a special type of still life developed in Antwerp by Jan Brueghel the Elder in collaboration with the Italian cardinal Federico Borromeo at the beginning of the 17th century.[11] The genre was initially connected to the visual imagery of the Counter-Reformation movement and typically involved a collaboration between a figure painter and a still life painter.[11] No collaborations with Boeckhorst on garland paintings have been attributed with certainty.

Boeckhorst is believed to have made changes to works by Rubens. He did so with a tronie painted by Rubens around 1613 called King David playing the Harp (Städel, Frankfurt am Main). The second Rubens tronie of c. 1616/17, which Boeckhorst transformed around 1640/41 into a bust-length format was the Head of a bearded man in profile holding a bronze figure (Christie’s, London, 2 July 2013, lot 30). He possibly also enlarged Rubens’ Rise of the Blessed at the request of Jan Wildens in order to form a pendant with the Fall of the Damned then in Wildens’ own collection. After the late 1630s Boeckhorst's collaborations appear to have ceased.[4]

Helena Fourment

Boeckhorst's portraits are influenced by Anthony van Dyck and Cornelis de Vos, the two leading portrait painters in the first half of the 17th century.[5] He occasionally painted lively group portraits. Some of his large group portraits, such as the Portrait of a Family (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), are in the style of Cornelis de Vos but with more liveliness and spontaneity.[12]

Central in his group portraits is the emphasis on the virtue of strong family bonds, the so-called 'Concordia familiae'. Boeckhorst was skilled in depicting his models in a spontaneous and lively manner. His portraits are of an informal character. He also used backdrop draperies, which in imitation of Jordaens, were represented very vividly.[5]

His later works from the 1650s and 1660s include numerous altarpieces for churches throughout Flanders and designs of cartoons for tapestries. The expressiveness of van Dyck's figures and use of colors, such as in Ulysses discovers Achilles dressed up as a girl (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), is also noticeable in works from this period.[13]