(Antwerp 1601–1678)
The Garden of Eden and the Fall of Adam and Eve,
oil on copper, 55.7 x 72 cm, framed

We are grateful to Klaus Ertz for confirming the authenticity of the present painting after having examined the work against the original (written communication).

So far, this composition by Jan Brueghel II is neither known in the form of a second autograph variant nor as a version by the hand of Jan Brueghel I. From Jan the Younger’s sporadic diary entries we know that after his return from Italy he initially busied himself with selling works from his father’s estate, completing paintings his father had left behind unfinished, and painting variants of the latter’s most successful compositions. During this period he still relied closely on his father as a model; only later did he begin to tackle his own pictorial inventions. The painting offered for sale here is probably based on a joint work by his father and Peter Paul Rubens devoted to the same subject (Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man, today at the Mauritshuis, The Hague). Although individual motifs in the present composition can be traced back to inventions by Jan the Elder, the comparison between the present painting and the painting in The Hague distinctly shows that by the time the present Garden of Eden was made, Jan Brueghel II had already emancipated himself from his father’s example.

The present painting exhibits Jan Brueghel the Younger’s typical brilliance of colour, achieved by a sophisticated technique of glazing and by using the costly support of a copper plate. A forest clearing is viewed from a low vantage point, with a depiction of the Fall of Man in the middle ground. The figures of the two protagonists, Adam and Eve, are by the hand of Abraham Willemsen, with whom Jan Brueghel II repeatedly collaborated. Such a division of work is typical of the Brueghel family’s paintings. For instance, Jan Brueghel I still collaborated with Hans Rottenhammer after the latter had long since moved from Antwerp to Augsburg. Ertz points out: ‘In the foreground, a broad spectrum of motifs typical of such paradisiacal landscapes is arranged from left to right, entirely in line with the “Brueghelian canon”: the pair of frolicking leopards, the hostile encounter between cat and dog, a wild duck, two ratites with long beaks, two peacocks, and a roebuck in profile […]. In the middle ground appear (from left to right): a wild goose, two pheasants, two cats, and, next to the scene of the Fall of Man, a pair of lions […]’.

Stylistically, the present painting clearly differs from works by the artist’s father, who increasingly concentrated on creating an illusion of depth in his compositions. Apart from Jan the Younger’s altogether more generous and effortless brushwork of the 1640s – the period to which Ertz dates the present painting – his pictures seem to be generally flatter. Ertz: ‘Only from the mid-1630s on did he arrive at his own style, which differs from that of his father in its slightly reduced colouring – more uniform shades of brown and green. This went hand in hand with a more painterly and livelier brushwork that cannot be found in his father’s work.’