Jacob Huysmans

1630 – 1696

Flemish painter, active in England as Jacob Houseman. He was a pupil of Gilles Backereel (c. 1572-before 1662) and Frans Wouters, presumably in Antwerp, but he came to London before the Restoration. Works painted soon after his arrival in England include small pastiches of mythological and religious subjects by Anthony van Dyck, and much of his mature work is in a flamboyantly Baroque manner that derives ultimately from van Dyck's second Flemish period and suggests, on a larger scale, the influence of Wouters. As a Roman Catholic he was acceptable to Charles II's consort, Catherine of Braganza, and to other Catholics at the English court. Principally as a result of the Queen's patronage, he enjoyed considerable success in the early years of the reign. Huysmans's most important portrait of Catherine of Braganza, Queen Catharine as a Shepherdess (c. 1664; Royal Collection, Windsor), is an elaborate display in the Arcadian manner, the underlying forms rather stiffly articulated and the flesh smoothly worked, but the costume and the riotous display of accessories painted with a bravura, indeed, in places, a vulgarity, that foreshadows passages in the work of Franz Xaver Winterhalter. The colours are highly individual, and the paint is applied with a boldness unparalleled in this period. A pallid orange tone often gives a strange lurid atmosphere to the background of Huysmans's compositions.

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