Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Jacob Jordaens
American; 20th-century
Antwerp, Belgium: Royal Museum of Fine Arts
77%
Neptune and Amphitrite. c1645. Oil on canvas
Jordaens was only ever aping Rubens. Sometimes it's simple mimicry, though, and other times it's more like a weirdening or an intensification, which is artistically more productive. That's what's going on here. Look at the back and the arms of the figure at bottom right, flexed beyond belief. There's none of the verve or the sumptuous sex of Rubens here, just his facility with paint carried to a far off, ugly extreme. The distending mass of flesh and horsebody at center is nearly disgusting, as are the clouds and that mocking rainbow behind them. If Rubens is already decadent, what do you call this? Muddled and degenerate, but far from worthless. (TFS, 2026)
Ghent, Belgium: Museum voor Schone Kunsten
61%
Studies of the Head of Abraham Grapheus. c1620-21. Oil on paper, mounted on panel
This study may not be Jordaens at his best, but the fact that it's close says a lot about his strengths — and more about his weaknesses. What's worth liking in this painting is the intensity of its handling. It's Daumier avant la lettre, almost Courbet: the 19th-century's great violent pilers of paint, as Jordaens was at his core. But just as there's little beyond this violence that justifies the painting — it is a study, after all — there's little in general in Jordaens, beyond his facility with the brush, that recommends his art. Will the heavy scumbling and rough surface forces upon these visages some truly odd and sickly combinations of color, the more one looks at them the less they seem to reveal. Jordaens was essentially a technician, if a twisted and experimental one. It is therefore of interest, and little more, to see him plying his craft. (TFS, 2026)
Antwerp, Belgium: Royal Museum of Fine Arts
59%
The Martyrdom of Saint Apollonia. 1628. Oil on canvas
It's a thin line upon the flesh of Rubens's figures that separates their infinities of hue and texture from a plain icky mottle. Jordaens tends to cross this line, as he's done here. Too, he's taken Caravaggio's horse from the Conversion and misunderstood it entirely, turning a canvas-spanning force of pure pictorial intensification into little more than a well-painted decoration; it's just some accoutrement in the low corner of the image. Of course there's accomplishment in this painting, like the continuous curving structure that moves from the foot at bottom right and up through the horse and then back to the arm of the priest, where it bisects to spiral towards both heaven and Apollonia's mouth. But overall this painting is dull and heavy and brown and flat, emptied-out Mannerism or sauceless baroque. Plus, like, it's a giant arch-top high-drama canvas about toothaches. Please. (TFS, 2026)