A Particularity of Flesh

Born in another age or in another country, Jacob Jordaens might have been considered a great painter. But the Low Countries in the 1600s, in spite of wars with Spain and brutal religious repression, saw the flowering of one incomparable painter after another--Vermeer and Rembrandt in Holland, Rubens and Van Dyck in Flanders. As a result, Jordaens passed into history as something of an also-ran. Now, thanks to a splendrous 315-work display of paintings, tapestries, drawings and prints at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Jordaens is finally getting the kind of full-beam spotlight necessary to illuminate his artistic individuality in all its flaws and triumphs.

Princely Portrait. Some of the triumphs, in fact, are being credited to Jordaens for the first time. Britain's Michael Jaffe, a Rubens scholar who assembled the show, perused the world's great treasure houses, ended by reat-tnbuting no fewer than 30 paintings and some 70 drawings to Jordaens. Among them is a princely portrait that had hung for 108 years in Scotland's Rossie Priory labeled "General Velasquez by Rubens." Another, portraying the infant Bacchus, Jaffe pulled from a musty storeroom in Warsaw's National Museum.

If scholars sometimes seem bafflingly mercurial as to just who had a brush in which painting, there is good reason. Every important master in those times--including Jordaens--kept an atelier that employed dozens of apprentices to help execute the large decorative panels that were the order of the day. Even major painters often helped each other on big commissions. Van Dyck and Jordaens worked side by side on the Rubens ceiling pieces for the Jesuit Church in Antwerp. The Jordaens show itself is also a major achievement in assemblage. Paintings were loaned by Queen Elizabeth, President Giuseppe Saragat of Italy, the Prado, and Rumania's Brukenthal Museum. Even Leningrad's Hermitage contributed.

What emerges from this definitive show is that Jordaens was not just a poor man's Rubens--who in that day was the acknowledged titan who bestrode not only the narrow world of Antwerp but all the courts of Europe. Certainly many of Jordaens' paintings echo his master, just as do some of Van Dyck's, Rubens' other (and younger) disciple. Van Dyck went to the British court to make a successful career as perhaps the sleekest portraitist of all time. Jordaens stayed in Antwerp.

Indulgent Affection. Jordaens scorned Van Dyck's elegancies. In contrast to Rubens, he looked at the roistering pleasures of a good burgher's family life without feeling any need to translate them into the realm of gods, goddesses or nymphs. He was more interested in the play of light than Rubens ever was, and his studies of faces, with that unexpected illumination that candlelight can bring, are something that Rubens never tried nor achieved.

Still, it is in his paintings of the Flemish family that Jordaens' particularity emerges. As the Old Sing, So the Young Twitter is ostensibly an allegory based on Twelfth Night. The symbols of mortality--a guttering candle, a menacing owl, a goldfinch--lurk in the background, but the foreground is far from heroic. The table is rich with a panoply of food. An old woman, poignantly observed down to the last wrinkle, sings from a song sheet to a sensuous mother holding a child on her lap. The paterfamilias, far from being majestic, is a fat burgher observed candidly but with indulgent affection. Over the burgher's shoulder, Jordaens has painted himself, sporting a fool's cap. It is both warm and sardonic, vividly realistic and monumentally composed.

Jordaens died in 1678, the same day as his daughter. A man who enjoyed the life of the senses, risked the displeasure of the Catholic authorities by turning Calvinist, he probably expected little of posterity. Posterity may not rank him among immortals, but the Ottawa show demonstrates he should have a place of his own.

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