"the King Drinks ..." - Oil On Canvas - Jacob Jordaens - 17th Century

"The King drinks ..." or "Thus sing the Old, so scold the Young ..." Oil on canvas, reentoile Provenance: This painting was in the collection of Charles Seldemeyer, one of the largest collector of the nineteenth Au verso, seal of the Seldemeyer Gallery Sale Seldemeyer June 3 - 5, 1907, under number 26. Sold as being of Jacob JORDAENS Charles Sedelmeyer, born April 30, 1837 in Vienna, and died August 9, 1925 in Paris, is a merchant Austrian art and publisher naturalized in 1895, one of the greatest collectors and gallerists of the nineteenth century, alongside London's Colnaghi and Thomas. Sedelmeyer then became the owner of the mansion of Madame de Sancy, lady-in-waiting of Empress Eugenie located at No. 6, rue de La Rochefoucault in Paris, which he annexed at No. 4 bis in the same street, where he had an art gallery built. Particularly affected by the death of his wife, he decided to sell almost all of his collection in four series of historical sales spread between May and June 1907 (sale of our painting), with the auctioneer Paul Chevalier hammer assisted by the expert Jules Féral, then withdraws from the Art market. He died on August 9, 1925 in Paris and is buried in the Montmartre cemetery. Jacob Jordaens (1593 - 1678) is a Flemish painter whose entire career took place in Antwerp. Very famous, he received orders from all over Europe. On the death of Rubens (1640) and Van Dyck (1641), Jordaens was considered the first painter of his hometown. Pupil of Adam Van Noort, he was received in 1615 as a master of the Antwerp guild as a tempera painter. He quickly acquired a personal style, but kept coming back to some models of his elders, especially Rubens and Caravaggio. Having never taken a trip to Italy, he finds in Caravagism very close correspondences with his own sensibility: a harsh realism, vigorous, ample bouncy shapes and a lighting that exalts the bright colors. He was also influenced by Rubens, whose themes and compositions inspired him for a long time. His work always oscillated between these two tendencies. In the studio of Rubens (1620 - 1640), Jordaens is more of a collaborator than a student of the master and works for twenty years at his side. He participates with Van Dyck in the great compositions that Rubens painted then. In 1622, after the departure of Van Dyck in Italy, he became the first assistant of Rubens and probably took part in the development of the twenty-one paintings ordered for the Medici gallery in Paris. A collaborator of Rubens, he continues to pursue his own career. He gradually reached maturity and his style found its happiest expression during the 1630s. He succeeded in presenting each subject with great realism, in group portraits (especially family portraits) as well as in religious scenes. He moves from one genre to the other in compositions often dense with sensual invoice and color blooming. He will draw until the end of his career in subjects that have ensured its success by proposing variants that will gradually lose power. The seventeenth-century painting bears witness, almost continuously, to a dynamic tension between the search for an ideal beauty and a fascinated, immediate apprehension of the profusion of the spectacle of the world that is summed up under the unsatisfactory term of realism. The artists of the southern Netherlands, known as "Spanish", claimed to attain that ideal beauty whose imitation of the antique was supposed to offer the safest and best marked path. Nevertheless, most of them did not give up their art in contact with the real, an incarnate real, carnal, especially under the Caravaggesque influence which sweeps over the Netherlands to become pregnant in the painting of a Jordaens to the end of the 1610s. The influence of caravagism, its use of voluntarily rustic, plebeian typologies to embody history played a decisive role in Jordaens' choice of physiognomies that were sometimes violently "anticlassical" but nevertheless marked by nobility. and of singular authenticity (like the Abraham Grapheus model) when they embody characters from mythology or sacred history.