(Antwerp 1614–1672)
The Adoration of the Shepherds,
oil on copper, 69.5 x 88 cm, framed

We are grateful to Bert Schepers of the Centrum Rubenianum, Antwerp, for endorsing the attribution of the present painting to Abraham Willemsens on the basis of a photograph and for his kind assistance in cataloguing this lot.

This charming scene relates closely to an engraving dated 1620 by Lucas Vorsterman I (1595–1675) after the Adoration of the Shepherds by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) conserved in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen (inv. no. 1803.6). Willemsens has expanded the composition on the right to include the dog taken from another print by Vosterman after the Adoration of the Shepherds conserved in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille (inv. no. BA 102).

Copies of Rubens’ oil sketches and paintings were in continuous demand by his contemporaries and appear in the stock lists of a number of prominent seventeenth-century art dealers, including the celebrated dealers Guillam Forchondt and Matthijs Musson. Willemsens, Victor Wolfvoet II, Willem van Herp, among others, produced the majority of such copies for this lucrative branch of the Antwerp art market and helped spread the Flemish Baroque style internationally. Indeed, the individual styles of Willemsens and Van Herp are often confused with one another, a problem further complicated by their occasional collaboration, with Willemsens adding some figures to Van Herp’s paintings and vice versa.

Abraham Willemsen was born in Antwerp in 1614. In 1627/28 he became a pupil of Guilliam Anthoni (Antonissens) and is recorded in the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke, later becoming elected as dean there in 1645. He was recorded in Paris the same year. It is assumed that he operated a large workshop of his own to supply the export market, notably in Spain, where many of his paintings can still be found. Later falling into obscurity, the painter was virtually unknown until the discovery in the early 1990s of a painting signed in full. Since then, his oeuvre has gradually been reconstituted.