Zeger Jacob van Helmont

1683 – 1726

Flemish painter and tapestry designer who specialized in portraits and history paintings. He trained with his history and portrait painter father Jan van Helmont (1650-c. 1730) in Antwerp but spent his active career in Brussels where he worked for the local churches and tapestry works. He joined the local Guild of Saint Luke in Brussels. As the result of the 1695 Bombardment of Brussels by French troops many churches, guilds and the local authorities ordered new artworks to replace those destroyed during the bombardment. Van Helmont secured many commissions from these institutions, he executed various religious works for the Brussels churches. He is known for paintings and tapestry designs of historical allegories, religious compositions and portraits painted in a Classicist style. He made a number of portraits, which were engraved. He also painted a portrait of his fellow painter Jacques Ignatius de Roore (1722, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes). Van Helmont made cartoons for the Brussels workshops. The Leyniers workshop ordered a series of cartoons on Ovid's Metamorphoses and Van Helmont copied works of the French artist Charles de La Fosse for this commission. He also made a series of scenes of country life 'after Teniers' together with the landscape painter Augustin Coppens.

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