Jordaens & The Antiques

© Slices of Light

Type:  Exhibitions

After the successful exhibition Rubens: A Genius at Work (14.09.2007-28.01.2008), the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels are planning a major exhibition on Jordaens and the Antique in 2012-2013.

Of the well-known Flemish trio “Rubens-Van Dyck-Jordaens,” Jacob Jordaens (Antwerp, 1593-1678) has been studied the least. The exhibition will present an entirely new picture of Jordaens. Instead of the painter of uncomplicated genre scenes – works like Twelfth Night, or The King Drinks, and As the Old Sing, So the Young Pipe – we find an artist intelligent enough to take over part of Rubens’s market share with lively mythological and antique scenes.

Loans of around 80 paintings and drawings, tapestries and sculpture from major museums and little-known private collections from Spain (Prado), Denmark (Statens Museum for Kunst), the United Kingdom (Glasgow Museum and Art Gallery) and Austria (Albertina), supplemented with key works from Brussels and Kassel, will offer the public lesser known yet unexpectedly engaging episodes from classical antique sources – from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Opinions of Famous Philosophers. 

As was the case for the Rubens exhibition, Jordaens and the Antique represents four years of thorough scholarly research and a major restoration campaign. In the years leading up to the exhibition’s opening, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels, and the Museumlandschaft Hessen Kassel will be restoring the masterpieces by Jordaens in their own collections.

Tags:  Arts, museum, antique, baroque, exhibition