Pseudo Jan Wellens de Cock (active in Antwerp c. 1520-40)
Several Antwerp archives mention a ‘Jan de Cock, painter’, who according to Van den Branden is identical with Jan Wellens de Cock (Antwerp c. 1470 - Antwerp 1521) recorded in the magistrates’ rolls in 1492. In August 1502 he married Clara van Beeringen, and two of their children were probably the landscape painter Matthijs Cock (c. 1510-before 1548) and the engraver and print publisher Hieronymus Cock (1518-70). In 1502 he was also admitted as an ‘assistant’ to the Antwerp Onze-Lieve-Vrouwe-Lof fraternity, for which he repaired the brothers’ works of art in the cathedral and made woodcuts. The ledgers of the Antwerp Guild of St Luke record two pupils of his in 1507 and 1516, one ‘Loduwyck’ and Wouter Key, none of whose works is known today. De Cock was clearly a respected artist, for he and Joos van Cleve were deans of the Antwerp guild in 1520. It can be deduced from the archives that he died in 1521.
On the basis of stylistic similarities to paintings from the school of Cornelis Engebrechtsz, Friedländer suggested that Jan de Cock may have come from Leiden, and was the ‘Jan van Leyen’ who enrolled as a free master in the Antwerp Guild of St Luke in 1503. However, nothing further is known about this Jan van Leyen, so this identification with Jan de Cock is purely hypothetical.
Although there is not a single signed work by Jan Wellens de Cock known today, Friedländer gave him a few small panels with saints and religious subjects. Friedländer’s point of departure was an unsigned panel of St Christopher, (SK-A-1598, fig. c), for a later 17th-century print after it has the inscription ‘Pictum J. Kock’. One feature of the works that Friedländer grouped around it, including the small Crucifixion triptych in the Rijksmuseum (SK-A-1598), are the detailed landscape settings for the figures, many of them saints. The way in which the landscape is shaped by steep crags, and the graceful forms of the figures, correspond not only to the work of the Antwerp Mannerists but also to the Leiden paintings of the same period. As Gibson and others have demonstrated, the similarities to works by presumed pupils of Cornelis Engelbrechtsz are striking. In addition, most of the attributed panels seem datable to the 1520s, which virtually demolishes Friedländer’s identification with Jan Wellens de Cock of Antwerp, who died in 1521.
Many of the works that Friedländer attributed to De Cock have therefore gradually been reassigned, by Beets, Hoogewerff and others, to a few of Engebrechtsz’s pupils, such as his sons Cornelis Cornelisz named Kunst (1493-1544) and Lucas Cornelisz named De Cock (1495-?), who are mentioned by Van Mander. Baldass, on the other hand, divided the attributions over two hands: the Master of the Vienna Dismissal of Hagar, and Jan de Cock. Gibson then attributed the works that Baldass had given to Jan de Cock to the Master of the Vienna Lamentation, and regarded both of these anonymous masters as pupils and assistants of Cornelis Engebrechtsz, possibly his sons. It is clear from this art-historical discussion that the paintings attributed to Jan de Cock over the years were in fact executed by different hands, but probably not by Jan de Cock himself. There is no certainty that they originated in either Antwerp or Leiden, and since none of those discussed in this catalogue, which were very probably made in Leiden, can be associated with the Antwerp painter Jan de Cock, they are here catalogued under the ad hoc name of Pseudo Jan Wellens de Cock.
MB/JPFK
References
Rombouts/Van Lerius I, 1864, pp. 58, 65, 87, 94; Van den Branden 1883, pp. 289-90; Thieme/Becker VII, 1912, p. 144; Baldass 1937; Friedländer XI, 1933, pp. 59-72; Beets 1936; Hoogewerff III, 1939, pp. 321-87; Gibson 1969a, pp. 161-200, 250-64; ENP XI, 1973, pp. 37-43; Filedt Kok in Amsterdam 1986a, p. 154; Riggs in Turner 1996, VII, p. 497; Romer in Saur XX, 1998, pp. 70-71; Van der Stock 1998, pp. 115, 119, 121, 207, 228, 258-59, 283; Born in Antwerp 2006, pp. 11-12; Yao-Fen You in Antwerp 2006, p. 224