Object data
oil on canvas
support: height 142 cm × width 233.4 cm
Sebastiaen Vrancx (attributed to)
c. 1635
oil on canvas
support: height 142 cm × width 233.4 cm
…; sale, Jan Foekes van Houtum (1816-74) et al., Amsterdam (C.F. Roos et al.), 18 November 1874 sqq., no. 92, with no attribution, fl. 66, to the dealer Rotteveel, The Hague;1 from whom to the Nederlandsch Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst, The Hague (inv. no. A 176), 1874; transferred to the museum, February 1885; transferred to the DRVK, 1959; returned, 1965; on loan to the Koninklijk Nederlands Leger-en Wapenmuseum ‘Generaal Hoefer’, Leiden, 1978; on loan to the Legermuseum, Delft, 1986-2013; on loan to the Nationaal Militair Museum, Soesterberg, since 2013
Object number: SK-A-857
Copyright: Public domain
Sebastiaen Vrancx (Antwerp 1573 - Antwerp 1647)
The versatile painter of small-scale figures and landscapes, Sebastiaen (Sebastiaan) Vrancx, was baptized in the Antwerp Sint-Jacobskerk on 22 January 1573, the son of Jan Vrancx, a merchant, and Barbara Coutereau. There is no record of his apprenticeship; but Karel van Mander, writing at second-hand early in Vrancx’s career, stated that he had been taught by the prominent Antwerp master Adam van Noort (1562-1641).2
The earliest record of his activity is a fluently executed sketch in pen and ink of an ex libris, dated 1594; it is evidence of his literary proclivity and also of his membership of the rhetoricians’ chamber De Violieren with whose motto it is also inscribed.3 In his later years, Vrancx was active as a playwright.4 He also embarked on a project to produce an illustrated edition of Virgil’s Aeneid translated into Dutch.5 The bookplate was presumably drawn in Antwerp. A drawing of the Colosseum is dated 1596 and is the earliest evidence of the artist’s stay in Rome, the foremost product of which was a series of some forty sketches of Roman views made in a now dismembered sketchbook begun in the following year.6 One of these drawings is dated 1601; it must have been made early in that year, as Vrancx was back in Antwerp to register as a master in the guild before the end of the accounting year, 25 September 1601.
One of his earliest assignments was to record the violent skirmish between cuirassier opponents in the Eighty Years’ War which had taken place outside ’s-Hertogenbosch in February 1600 (see SK-A-1409). His drawing was engraved by Johannes van Doetecum II (c. 1560-1630) then active in Rotterdam; it was most likely Vrancx’s first depiction of a martial subject, a genre which he popularized and which reflected his personal interest in the exercise of arms. In 1613 he became dean of the fencers’ guild, and in 1626 he was appointed captain of the Antwerp civic guard, a distinction which was commemorated in the rubric of the engraved portrait in Anthony van Dyck’s Iconography.7
Vrancx’s Massacre of the Innocents of 1600 is his earliest, extant dated painting.8 The artist was later to prove adept at creating architectural capriccio’s as settings for elegantly described biblical and allegorical subjects, town views and country festivals. As an acute observer of the everyday scene, he was of a calibre comparable with Jan Brueghel I (1568-1625), with whom he collaborated on rare occasions, as he did with Tobias Verhaecht (c. 1560-1631) and Joos de Momper II (1564-1634/35) among others.
Vrancx was an active member of the painters’ guild, of which he was nominated dean for the year 1612/13; he was later to be dean of the exclusive Confraternity of Peter and Paul. He is recorded as having taken on two pupils in 1607/08 and 1612/13; but his most famous pupil, Peeter Snayers (1592-1667), was never registered with the guild. He was reportedly averse to having studio copies made after his work.9
Vrancx married the daughter of an art dealer, Maria Pamphi, in 1612; she and their daughter predeceased him in 1639. He was buried in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk on 16 May 1647.
REFERENCES
P. Rombouts and T. van Lerius, De Liggeren en andere historische archieven der Antwerpsche Sint Lucasgilde, ondere zinspreuk: ‘Wt Ionsten Versaemt’, 2 vols., Antwerp/The Hague 1864-76 (reprint Amsterdam 1961), I, 412, 474, 483, 490, 511, 524, 539; II, 108, 185; F.J. van den Branden, Geschiedenis der Antwerpsche schilderschool, 3 vols., Antwerp 1883, pp. 469-74; Vander Auwera in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, 34 vols., Basingstoke 1996, pp. 898-99
Following the war of the Jülich (Gulick) succession and the siege of the town in 1609-14, the next investment of Jülich, a strategically important centre some 25 kilometres north-east of Aachen, lasted some five months during the exceptionally cold winter of 1621/22.10 From the viewpoint of the Eighty Years’ War, it was the first major event following the end of the Twelve Years Truce in April 1621.11 The town was garrisoned by the army of Wolfgang Ernst I (1560-1633), Count of Isenburg, made up of 4000 soldiers and eight cannon, and commanded by the Dutch military governor, Lieutenant-Colonel Frederik Pithan. The town was invested by Hendrik (1573-1638), Count van den Bergh, on orders from Ambrogio Spinola (1569-1630), commander-in-chief of the Spanish army in the Netherlands, leading some 7000 Spanish infantry and 700 cavalry to be reinforced by further troops.12 The siege began on 5 September and the town surrendered on 3 February. It remained under Spanish control until 1660.
Although early identified as the 1603 siege of Wassendonk or Wachtendonk, there can be no doubt that the view in the present picture is of Jülich taken from the west. It shows a snow-covered landscape with the frozen river Roer or Ruhr. Beyond is the town with the two round towers of the Hexenturm and, nearby, the spire of the parish church, Maria Himmelfahrt. To the left is the citadel – the palazzo in fortezza designed by Alessandro Pasqualini, responsible for the lay-out of Jülich as an ideal Renaissance town from 154813 – with its towers incorrectly configured. To the left is the village of Broich, and beyond what was described in contemporary prints as ‘Das erste Principal Quartier’ of the Spanish army.14 Before the citadel is a cavalry skirmish, perhaps that which took place on 21 October,15 near the Cologne road. In the near middle ground is the line of the besiegers’ fortified outworks. Two Spanish cavalry patrols at some distance approach each other. That to the left has two trumpeters in the van, which might well indicate that its commander, thus suitably escorted and wearing a red plume to his helmet and red sash, was intended to be identified as van den Bergh himself (he wears the Spanish army commander’s red armband in Anthony van Dyck’s portrait in the Museo Nacional del Prado).16
The Amsterdam picture was given to the museum as the work of Sebastiaen Vrancx, an attribution which was early changed to his pupil, Peeter Snayers (1592-1667), and has been accepted as such ever since. In fact, Snayers did depict the siege from a similar, but higher, viewpoint.17 However, the figures in the Snayers are quite differently handled and Vander Auwera agrees that those in the museum picture should be returned to Vrancx.18 As he points out, Vrancx painted another view of the siege, probably in the mid-1620s;19 this has a lower viewpoint and was taken from a position further from the redoubts. In all three works the configuration of the outworks and cottages is similar, but not the same.
Judging only from a digital image Vander Auwera believes that the landscape in the present picture is also by Vrancx working in the 1630s. The state of the paint surface and discoloured varnish makes assessment of it difficult. While it might be thought that the fieldworks, buildings and defences round the town and citadel are too crude to be his work, he points out that in the 1630s Vrancx’s manner of execution is ‘somewhat less finished and weaker as to definition of form’.20 Against this are the pentiments, seemingly incoherent, in the foreground redoubts, buildings and walls betraying an uncertainty not easily explained if his, as Vrancx had painted the view before. In one instance – the cottage in the right foreground – a pentiment in the roof makes it accord with that in his earlier picture. A further complication is that the design of the outworks is more like those devised by Snayers. Such being the case it seems wisest at this stage to attribute the painting as a whole to Vrancx, without ruling out the possibility that the landscape is the work of a lesser hand to which Vrancx added figures.
Dautzenberg is the last to repeat that the star-shaped redoubts (in the Snayers) are probably imagined.21 However, contemporary prints of the siege, published by Neumann, show similar field-works.22 These were aerial views mostly taken from the north, which would have provided sufficient information for Vrancx and Snayers to execute their seemingly more realistic formulations of the event as seen from the east.
Gregory Martin, 2022
H. Neumann, Stadt und Festung Jülich auf bildlichen Darstellungen: Von der Tabula Peutingeriana bis zur Grundkarte der 2. Hälfte des 20 Jahrhunderts, Bonn 1991, p. 266, no. 108; R. Hennewald and P. Hrnčiřík, Pieter Snayers 1592-1667: Battle Painter of the Seventeenth Century, Berlin 2018, pp. 132-38 (as by Pieter Snayers)
1886, p. 112, no. 507a; 1897, p. 183, no. 1594 (as Vrancx, Siege of Wachtendonk); 1903, p. 247, no. 2207 (as Snayers, Siege of Gulik (?)); 1934, p. 264 (as Snayers, Siege of Gulik); 1976, p. 516, no. A 857 (as Snayers, Siege of a city thought to be Gulik)
G. Martin, 2022, 'attributed to Sebastiaen Vrancx, The Siege of Jülich, 1621-22, c. 1635 - ', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.7033
(accessed 10 November 2024 18:46:54).