Anton van den Heuvel

1600 – 1677

Flemish painter. To judge by the large number of paintings by him which have survived, Anton van den Heuvel must be considered the most successful representative of Ghent Caravaggism. In the declaration he made when he was admitted as a master in the Guild of Saint Luke of Ghent in 1628, he stated that in the previous 10 years he had been working in Antwerp and Rome. Like Jan Janssens, the other significant painter of the Ghent Caravaggism, he painted large numbers of religious pictures mainly for churches in and near Ghent. His early work is marked by a liking for bright colour effects and hard lighting, with little tonality in transitional shades. His later paintings, dated from the 1640s are duller in colouring and therefore less expressive. He derived his motifs and compositions from painters such as Rubens and Gaspar de Crayer.

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