Oil Painting-jan Erasmus Quellinus Said Sederboom-the Holy Family-1695

Jan Erasmus Quellinus dit Sederboom (Antwerp, 1634 – Mechelen, 1715) The Holy Family Oil on its original canvas (sewn in the center) 90 x 65.5 cm Beautiful black and gold frame from the 17th century This canvas is a reworking of the central part of a large Holy Family preserved in the Saint-Just church in Arbois (Jura). Signed by Jean-Erasme Quellinus the Younger, this painting painted in Antwerp is dated 1695. The extraordinary quality of treatment of the bunch of grapes allows us to affirm that it is probably, if not a modello, at least of the autograph reworking of an essential element of the work – and which gives it its meaning. Jan Erasmus Quellinus is the heir to an illustrious dynasty of Antwerp artists. His grandfather, Erasmus I Quellinus, was a sculptor. His father, Erasmus II, was an important and cultured painter, a doctus pictor who worked with Rubens and took part in major decorative commissions. His uncles were, one engraver, the other a sculptor. Trained in his father's workshop, Jan Erasmus traveled to Italy in 1660, which helped to give him a solid classical foundation. Back in Antwerp, he was registered as a master with the guild of Saint Luke and married the daughter of the painter David II Téniers. Appointed engineer of the castle of Antwerp in 1674, he received in 1680 the title of "painter of the chamber of His Imperial Majesty". He worked for churches and convents and held a workshop which trained many apprentices. But beset at the end of his life by financial problems, he died ruined and almost blind. The iconography of our painting is unique and can be read in two, perhaps complementary, ways. Saint John the Baptist and an angel bring to the child Jesus, seated on the lap of the Virgin, a monumental bunch of grapes which seems to be the bunch of Canaan – this giant bunch which, according to the Bible, the children of Israel harvested in valley of Eshcol, and which they reported to Moses and Aaron, saying to them, "We have gone to the land where you sent us. In truth, it is a land flowing with milk and honey, and here are the fruits. The two children carry the cluster on a pole, like the figures in the foreground of Nicolas Poussin's L'Automne. Standing behind the Virgin, Saint Joseph points to what could be the promised land in the distance. However, this interpretation is not enough to explain the gloomy gaze, the morose air of little John the Baptist in his shepherd's skin, nor the tears that flow down the angel's cheeks. Because we are connected here with another meaning of the grape, symbol of the wine of the Eucharist and consequently of the blood of Christ. “The first grape pressed in the press was Christ, says Saint Augustine; and this once pressed by the Passion, what remained of this was this intoxicating chalice. From the infancy of Christ, the cluster prefigures the Passion, and this presentiment darkens the peaceful portrait of the Holy Family.