Pieter Aertsen was undoubtedly an artist of stature: His height earned him the nickname Lange Pier and his great talent made him an esteemed painter of his time. A representative of Northern Alpine Mannerism, he is regarded as the inventor of monumental genre painting, for which he combined elements of still life and genre scenes in an innovative way.
(...) Continue readingPieter Aertsen - Member of the Antwerp Painters' Guild; move to Amsterdam
Pieter Aertsen was born around 1509 in Amsterdam, where he learnt the basics of his art at an early age from Aertgen van Leyden (Allart Claesz). Following this apprenticeship, he travelled through the southern Netherlands and finally settled in Antwerp, where he initially formed a studio partnership with Jan Mandijn. Aertsen demonstrated such great skill as a painter that he was accepted as a full member of the local St Luke's Guild in 1535 and was granted citizenship of the city of Antwerp in 1542. As such, he was able that same year to marry Kathelijne Beuckelaer, a relative of his pupil Joachim Beuckelaer, who later also made a name for himself as a painter. The couple had eight children, three of whom, their sons Pieter, Aert and Dirk Aertsen, followed in their father's footsteps and also became successful painters. Pieter Aertsen enjoyed quick success as a painter, but realised that most of his wealthy clients came from Amsterdam and therefore decided to move there.
Pieter Aertsen elevated the accessories to the main focus
Pieter Aertsen began his career with religious motifs before moving on to domestic scenes, in which he excelled in the realistic depiction of furniture, kitchen utensils and, above all, food. By placing a strong emphasis on what was actually subordinate and incidental, he achieved a similar development in still life and genre painting as his Antwerp colleague Joachim Patinir had previously achieved in landscape painting. In his market scene, the biblical subject of Christ and the adulteress almost completely disappears in the colourful hustle and bustle of the market. However, the motif of shameless desire is illustrated both by the shamelessly lustful looking market women and by the numerous birds - even then, the German verb vögeln (the German for bird/s is vogel/vögel), referred to the sexual act in a crude way. With his reversal of priorities, Aertsen went far beyond Patinir and approached Jan Sanders van Hemessen, whose genre paintings also had parallel narrative structures.
Clear influence on subsequent generations
Pieter Aertsen differed from other contemporary Dutch masters such as Pieter Brueghel the Elder not least in his strongly idealised depiction of figures, which is particularly evident in the women, but a certain similarity to the portraiture of artists such as Anthonis Mor cannot be denied. While Pieter Aertsen's market and kitchen paintings exerted an immense influence on Flemish still life painting even after his death, his altarpieces were not granted such an impact: During the artist’s lifetime, a large number of these works fell victim to the infamous iconoclasm in 1566, and another part of his oeuvre was destroyed in the turmoil of later wars. Later artists such as Rubens continued Pieter Aertsen's quirk of emphasising elements of still life in history painting, although no other artist apart from Joachim Wtewael did so as clearly.
Pieter Aertsen died in Amsterdam in 1575.
Pieter Aertsen - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
