Still Life with Fish and a Lobster and Oysters on a Table nearby

Alexander Adriaenssen (Antwerp 1587 - Antwerp 1661)

Alexander Adriaenssen, the second child of Emanuel (a celebrated composer and lutanist, who died in 1606) and Sibilla Aelin, was baptized in the Sint-Jacobskerk, Antwerp, on 16 January 1587. He was brought up in a house on the Meir, and in 1597/98 enrolled as a pupil of the obscure Artus van Laeck. He became a master, as a painter in watercolour, in the Antwerp guild of St Luke in 1610/11. He married in 1611; Peeter Snayers (1592-1667) and Isabella Brant, the wife of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), were among those who acted as godparents of his six children. He is recorded as having had only one apprentice (in 1632), and as having lived in several Antwerp addresses without ever having owned a house. The inscription on his tombstone in the Sint-Jacobskerk, copied in the nineteenth century, gave his date of death as 30 October 1661.

Adriaenssen’s still lifes are listed in Antwerp deceased estates from 1634. Owners were members of the wealthy bourgeoisie, for instance a cloth and a feather merchant, a surgeon and an innkeeper; the widow of a fishmonger owned at her death in 1655 two still lifes of shells and one of birds. His most prominent Antwerp admirer was his acquaintance Rubens, who owned at his death in 1640 two still lifes of birds and fruit.² But the greatest testimony to his art took place not in Antwerp, but in Madrid, where in his will of 1652, but effectively during his lifespan, the statesman, great collector and lover of Flemish painting, Diego de Guzmán (1580-1655), Marqués de Leganés, gave six still lifes by Adriaenssen to the king, Philip IV; four of these have survived the vicissitudes of the Spanish royal collection and are in Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.³

There are some two hundred extant works by Adriaenssen, who has been described as perhaps the most productive fish still life painter in seventeenth-century Antwerp.⁴ Apart from fish he mostly depicted fruit, birds, flowers and game in cabinet paintings.

His portrait by Jacob Deneys (1644-1708) was engraved by Antoon van der Does (1609-1680).⁵ The rubric reads: ‘Florum Avium et Piscium Pictor Excellens Antverpiae’ (excellent painter of flowers, birds and fish from Antwerp). He was also a heraldic painter, in which capacity he participated in the decorations for the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand’s Joyous Entry into Antwerp in 1635.

REFERENCES
G. Spiessens, Leven en werk van de Antwerpse Schilder Alexander Adriaenssen (1587-1661), Brussels 1990, pp. 13-28