The painting ‘The Holy Family’ by Jacob Jordaens, which has been hanging in the town hall of Saint-Gilles for 60 years, is not a copy but the original work. This appears after scientific research.
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Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678) was one of the most important Flemish Baroque painters of the 17th century. Just like his great example Pieter-Paul Rubens, he built a studio with students as helpers. Jordaens was a very successful painter who regularly quoted from his own work in new paintings. Nobody made a point of that in the 17th century.
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The Holy Family is a good example of this. A number of versions of that painting were made. One of these has hung since the 1960s in the offices of the Alderman for Urban Planning in the town hall of Saint-Gilles
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In 2019, the Brussels Region decided, through Urban-Brussels, to list all 800 works of art in the town hall of Saint-Gilles as part of the inventory of the movable heritage of Brussels. The Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK) examined the alleged copy. After a year of research, the institution – after collaborating with the international experts of the Jordaens Van Dyck Panel Paintings Project – concludes that the work in Brussels is the original painting. It is not the hand of a student or follower.
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©(rv)
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For a long time, the panel was in the collection of a Brussels painter who donated his entire art collection to Saint-Gilles after his death in 1915.
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When an art historian from IRPA turned the canvas over, he found clues on the reverse, such as a 1618 insignia of the control committee of the city of Antwerp and a hallmark of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke from the same period. At that time Jordaens did not have any students of his own.
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Rubens’s studio
Further analysis also showed that the young Antoon van Dyck (1599-1641) used wood from the same tree for several of his compositions. This reinforces the hypothesis that the young Jordaens and Van Dyck were simultaneously working in Rubens’s studio.
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The panel has been undergoing renovation for a year now. It is discolored and cracked at the bottom. By the end of 2021 it should be on display in its original glory at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels. This museum has a large collection of Jordaensen, including one of his masterpieces ‘The King drinks’.
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