Exhibition: "Brueghel & Van Balen, artists & accomplices", Musée de Flandre, Cassel, France.
17th May – 28th September 2025.

The staging of an exhibition devoted to Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625) and Hendrick van Balen (c. 1575-1632) is an ideal moment to shine a light on the talents of these two painters, as well as on their remarkable artistic partnership.

In the first decades of the seventeenth century, Brueghel and van Balen were two of the leading painters in Antwerp - the artistic capital of the Southern Netherlands.  They were also close friends and frequent collaborators, who over the course of 25 years, executed dozens of paintings together.  The two had much in common, but the success of their joint ventures was dependent upon the complementary nature of their very different styles and specialisms.  An unusually versatile and prolific artist, Brueghel was renowned for his landscape and still-life paintings, executed in a delicate and meticulous manner, which earned him the sobriquet “Velvet Brueghel”.  Van Balen was a figure painter, who specialised in cabinet-sized pictures depicting religious, mythological and allegorical subjects. 

The senior of the two artists by eight years, Brueghel was born in Brussels in 1568.  He was the second son of celebrated artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525/30-1569).  Jan trained initially with his maternal grandmother, Mayken Verhulst, a miniaturist and watercolourist, and then with Pieter Goetkindt, in Antwerp.  In 1589, he made an artistic pilgrimage to Italy and remained there for almost seven years.  While In Rome, Brueghel joined a close-knit group of Northern artists, which included Paul Bril and Hans Rottenhammer, and secured the patronage of an elite group of collectors, who shared an appreciation for small, minutely detailed paintings on copper.  During this period, he met Cardinal Federico Borromeo, a discerning and enthusiastic collector, who became his most important patron and lifelong friend. When Borromeo was appointed Archbishop of Milan in 1595, Breughel accompanied him there as a member of his household, before returning home the following year.  Back in Antwerp, Brueghel joined the painters’ Guild of St. Luke and was received into the exclusive Society of Romanists, whose membership was restricted to those who had travelled to Rome. 

Hendrick van Balen was born in Antwerp around 1595.  According to Karel van Mander, he was a pupil of Adam van Noort, and in 1592/93, became a master in the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke.  Like Brueghel, Van Balen undertook a journey to Rome by way of rounding off his artistic education.  Although his trip is undocumented, he must have been there sometime between 1595 and 1600.  In any event, he was certainly back in Antwerp no later than 1602, where he quickly established a workshop and began to take on apprentices.  In 1604, he bought a house on Lange Nieuwestraat, a desirable area of the city where well-to-do citizens had townhouses, and his friend and colleague Jan Brueghel also resided.  The following year he became a member of the Society of Romanists and got married to Margareta Briers, with whom he was to have eleven children.

From shortly after Van Balen’s return to Antwerp, the private and professional lives of Brueghel and Van Balen became closely intertwined.  As we have seen, they became neighbours on the Lange Nieuwestraat, which must have greatly facilitated their joint working since their panels and copper panels could now be moved from one studio to the other with relative ease. They also established close family ties, serving as godparents to each other’s offspring on several occasions.  After Brueghel’s death, Van Balen became guardian to Brueghel’s underage children and continued to work with his son Jan the Younger.

The earliest known collaborative venture between Brueghel and Van Balen dates from 1600[i], after which they seem to have quickly developed a successful partnership in which Van Balen was responsible for the figures, while Brueghel provided the landscape settings, flowers, fruit, animals, and precious objects. In 1604, they executed their first allegory, Ceres and the Four Elements[ii], and three years later, at the behest of his Italian patron Federico Borromeo, Brueghel painted his first flower garland surrounding Van Balen’s small oval painting of the Virgin and Child[iii], thereby initiating a genre that was to become enormously popular.  From then until Brueghel’s sudden death in 1625, the two artists worked together frequently.  Although both painters also collaborated with other colleagues, theirs was an especially productive and fruitful relationship.  Indeed, a considerable portion of both their oeuvres was produced collaboratively[iv].  Examples of their coproduction can be viewed in the ‘Paintings’ section of this website, under Hendrick van Balen, Venus and Vulcan, and also in ‘Notable Sales’, under Brueghel and van Balen The Five Senses.

Both Brueghel and Van Balen shared a predilection for copper as a support for their paintings.  It is likely that both were introduced to the technique in Italy where the practise of painting on small copper panels had become widespread by the later 16^th century.  From early in their careers, both artists enthusiastically embraced the use of copper, which allowed for a new clarity of expression, the smooth, luminous surface of the metal being ideally suited to their refined and meticulous techniques.  Furthermore, small-format, finely rendered works on copper exactly chimed with the cultivated collecting tastes of Roman connoisseurs in the circle of Federico Borromeo, who liked to display them along with other works of art in small cabinet rooms.

Among the collectors in Borromeo’s circle with a passion for Jan Brueghel was Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani.  In 1601, he added six paintings by Brueghel to his extensive collection, which was housed in his palace on Piazza S. Luigi dei Francesi.  The paintings are listed in the inventory in related pairs – a Giudizio and a Diluvio, a Paradiso and an Inferno, and an Adorazione dei Magi and an Incendio de Troia. All were on copper panels of approximately the same size and framed in black ebony.  Today four of the paintings from this group, which long ago became separated and scattered in different collections around the world, have been brought together in the exhibition at the Musée de Flandre opening on 17^th May 2025.  Included among this group is our painting of The Last Judgement (Giudizio).

Captions to the illustrations

Image 1)  Anthony van Dyck, Jan Brueghel the Elder, etching.

Image 2)  Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of Hendrick van Balen, drawing. Getty Museum collection. 

[i] Hendrick van Balen, The Judgement of Paris, 1600, on copper, 25 x 19.3 cm, Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, inv. No. B204. 

[ii] Jan Brueghel I & Hendrick van Balen, Ceres and the Four Elements, 1604, on copper, 42 x 71 cm, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Inv. No. 815. 

[iii] Jan Brueghel I & Hendrick van Balen, Madonna and Child in a Flower Garland, c. 1607-08, on panel and silver, 27 x 22 cm, Milan, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Inv. No. 71. 

[iv] See: Bettina Werche, Hendrick van Balen (1575-1632), Ein Antwerpener Kabinettbildmaler der Rubenszeit, 2004, pp. 60-62.  Dr. Werche regards 78 of the 192 catalogued cabinet pieces as collaborations with Jan Brueghel I.