Adrian van Stalbemt

Variant namesprimary name: Adrian van Stalbemt

DatesBiographical dates: 1580 - 1662 Dead: dead 1662 Born: born 1580

Gender

BiographyBiography: Flemish landscape- , history- and genre painter and etcher. After the fall of Antwerp (1585) his Protestant family emigrated to Middelburg, but Adriaen later returned to his native city. In 1609, at the age of 29, he became a master in the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke, but by then he must already have had something of a career behind him. Nothing is known about his teachers or his early training. Stalbemt was later a dean of the Guild in 1618 and in 1632-1633; he trained three apprentices. At Antwerp he is known to have collaborated with both Jan Brueghel I and Frans Francken II. In 1633 he spent ten months in England, probably summoned by King Charles I. Here he painted, among other works, two views of Greenwich in collaboration with Jan van Belcamp. In addition to landscapes in the manner of Jan Brueghel I and Gillis van Coninxloo, woodland scenes with hunters or peasants, and representations of village festivals, Stalbemt also painted religious, mythological and allegorical scenes. He was a highly eclectic artist whose oeuvre shows great stylistic variety, and which, because of the small number of dated works, can only with difficulty be catalogued chronologically. One group of paintings previously attributed to the German painter Adam Elsheimer, some of which might date around 1609 or earlier, was reattributed to Stalbemt by Andrews (1973). Stalbemt’s earlier work, thus, consists in part of history paintings, with a compositional scheme clearly reminiscent of Elsheimer, whose work he may have known through the Flemish Elsheimer-follower David Teniers I, who had returned north from Italy in 1605. There is no record of an Italian sojourn by Stalbemt, but the signed Drunkenness of Bacchus (Paris, Coll. M. Haim-Gairac), in which the figures resemble those of the early Elsheimer-influenced group discussed by Andrews, is also clearly derived from the Mediterranean seascapes of the Rome-based Flemish landscapist Paul Bril. Other works reveal the influence of Jan Brueghel I in their meticulous depiction of a wooded landscape. The artist’s later works, after c. 1621, reveal the influence of Hendrick van Balen.

External links