The Reconciliation between Jacob and Esau,
oil on panel, 59 x 84 cm, framed

Provenance:
Northern German private collection

Exhibited:
The painting was on loan to the Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum, Hannover, for a period of ten years.

The present painting comes with an extensive certificate by Dr. Klaus Ertz. Dr. Ertz writes: “It can be said that the painting is in fine condition. The colours are thickly applied in an impasto manner and after the picture’s cleaning make a brilliant impression. The individual glazes are typically superimposed on top of one another and lend the composition a peculiar three-dimensionality. The paint has been fluently and broadly applied with a swift brush. Without technological aids I would have recognized neither the overpainting nor the retouches… This panel is a further proof of the collaboration between the Flemish painters Hendrik van Balen and Jan Brueghel the Younger. Jan, who was Van Balen’s junior, had already met the latter artist when he was trained in the workshop of his father, Jan Brueghel the Elder. Van Balen and Jan the Younger’s working together before the latter’s journey to Italy (1622–1625) is attested to by paintings in whose completion both artists were involved. Yet it was only after the death of his father in 1625, when Jan the Younger took over his workshop, that this collaboration was considerably intensified. Starting in 1626, Jan the Younger’s diary lists numerous compositions in which both painters participated. Van Balen became Jan II’s most important collaborator and had a crucial share in the younger artist’s being able to establish himself in Antwerp so quickly with his father’s workshop. Their prosperous cooperation only came to an end when Van Balen died in 1632…” The present composition is based on a work by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Hendrik van Balen that was with the art dealer Müllenmeister in Solingen in 1991. For comparison, Ertz refers to the following joint products by H. van Balen and J. Brueghel the Younger: (1) Noli me tangere (German private collection, c. 1620); (2) The Encounter of David and Abigail (Mauritshuis, The Hague, between 1625 and 1632); (3) Saint Philip and the Eunuch (Mauritshuis, The Hague, between 1625 and 1632); (4) Pallas Athena and the Nine Muses (Swiss private collection, c. 1621/22); (5) The Rape of Europa (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, c. 1621/22). Ertz continues: “I believe that due to stylistic similarities in the works of both artists, the painting to be assessed here dates from the late 1620s. This period ‘fits in’ with the painterly and dynamic brushwork that already reveals the independent development of Jan’s landscape style at the time. Van Balen’s soft, corpulent figures are reminiscent of those by Rubens, his great example. They are typical of the painters style between 1625 and 1632, whereas at the beginning of the century he had rather been borrowing from Hans Rottenhammer’s more slender figure style…”
This joint product by Hendrik van Balen and Jan Brueghel the Younger seems to have been painted in Antwerp around 1630.