Sebastiaen Vrancx (Antwerp 1573 - Antwerp 1647)

The versatile painter of small-scale figures and landscapes, Sebastiaen (Sebastiaan) Vrancx, was baptized in the Antwerp Sint-Jacobskerk on 22 January 1573, the son of Jan Vrancx, a merchant, and Barbara Coutereau. There is no record of his apprenticeship; but Karel van Mander, writing at second-hand early in Vrancx’s career, stated that he had been taught by the prominent Antwerp master Adam van Noort (1562-1641).³³H. Miedema (ed.), Karel van Mander: The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, 6 vols., Doornspijk 1994-99, I, pp. 440-41, and VI, p. 62.

The earliest record of his activity is a fluently executed sketch in pen and ink of an ex libris, dated 1594; it is evidence of his literary proclivity and also of his membership of the rhetoricians’ chamber De Violieren with whose motto it is also inscribed.⁴⁴A. Keersmaekers, ‘De schilder Sebastiaen Vrancx (1573-1647) als rederijker’, Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (1982), pp. 165-86, esp. pp. 168-69, and fig. 2. In his later years, Vrancx was active as a playwright.⁵⁵A. Keersmaekers, ‘De schilder Sebastiaen Vrancx (1573-1647) als rederijker’, Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (1982), pp. 165-86, esp. pp. 175ff. He also embarked on a project to produce an illustrated edition of Virgil’s Aeneid translated into Dutch.⁶⁶L. Wood Ruby, ‘Sebastiaen Vrancx as Illustrator of Virgil’s Aeneid’, Master Drawings 28 (1990), pp. 54-73. The bookplate was presumably drawn in Antwerp. A drawing of the Colosseum is dated 1596 and is the earliest evidence of the artist’s stay in Rome, the foremost product of which was a series of some forty sketches of Roman views made in a now dismembered sketchbook begun in the following year.⁷⁷M. Jaffé, ‘The Roman Sketchbook of Sebastian Vrancx at Chatsworth’, in E. Mai, K. Schütz and H. Vlieghe (eds.), Die Malerei Antwerpens: Gattungen, Meister, Wirkungen: Studien zur flämischen Kunst des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts: Internationales Kolloquium Wien 1993, Cologne 1994, pp. 195-205; M.R. Nappi, ‘Il viaggio in Italia di Sebastiaen Vrancx’, Bollettino d’Arte (Fiamminghi à Roma Supplement) (1997), pp. 171-90, esp. p. 187 under note 8. One of these drawings is dated 1601; it must have been made early in that year, as Vrancx was back in Antwerp to register as a master in the guild before the end of the accounting year, 25 September 1601.

One of his earliest assignments was to record the violent skirmish between cuirassier opponents in the Eighty Years’ War which had taken place outside ’s-Hertogenbosch in February 1600 (see SK-A-1409). His drawing was engraved by Johannes van Doetecum II (c. 1560-1630) then active in Rotterdam; it was most likely Vrancx’s first depiction of a martial subject, a genre which he popularized and which reflected his personal interest in the exercise of arms. In 1613 he became dean of the fencers’ guild, and in 1626 he was appointed captain of the Antwerp civic guard, a distinction which was commemorated in the rubric of the engraved portrait in Anthony van Dyck’s Iconography.⁸⁸S. Turner and C. Depauw, The New Hollstein Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, 1450-1700: Anthony van Dyck, 8 vols., Rotterdam 2002, II, no. 101, IV state. The rubric reads: ‘Pictor Prælorium Minorum Cohortis Civium Antwerp. Ductor’.

Vrancx’s Massacre of the Innocents of 1600 is his earliest, extant dated painting.⁹⁹J. Vander Auwera, ‘Sebastiaen Vrancx (1573-1647) en zijn samenwerking met Jan I Brueghel (1568-1625)’, Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor schone Kunsten Antwerpen (1981), pp. 135-51, esp. pp. 146-47, fig. 9; a Feast of the Gods (?) signed and dated (?) 1596, was offered New York (Christies), 19 April 2007, no. 238. The artist was later to prove adept at creating architectural capriccio’s as settings for elegantly described biblical and allegorical subjects, town views and country festivals. As an acute observer of the everyday scene, he was of a calibre comparable with Jan Brueghel I (1568-1625), with whom he collaborated on rare occasions, as he did with Tobias Verhaecht (c. 1560-1631) and Joos de Momper II (1564-1634/35) among others.

Vrancx was an active member of the painters’ guild, of which he was nominated dean for the year 1612/13; he was later to be dean of the exclusive Confraternity of Peter and Paul. He is recorded as having taken on two pupils in 1607/08 and 1612/13; but his most famous pupil, Peeter Snayers (1592-1667), was never registered with the guild. He was reportedly averse to having studio copies made after his work.¹⁰¹⁰J. Denucé, Briefen und Dokumente in Bezug auf Jan Bruegel I und II, Antwerp 1934, p. 46, for Peter and Antoon Goetkint’s letter of 7 October 1624.

Vrancx married the daughter of an art dealer, Maria Pamphi, in 1612; she and their daughter predeceased him in 1639. He was buried in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk on 16 May 1647.

REFERENCES
P. Rombouts and T. van Lerius, De Liggeren en andere historische archieven der Antwerpsche Sint Lucasgilde, ondere zinspreuk: ‘Wt Ionsten Versaemt’, 2 vols., Antwerp/The Hague 1864-76 (reprint Amsterdam 1961), I, 412, 474, 483, 490, 511, 524, 539; II, 108, 185; F.J. van den Branden, Geschiedenis der Antwerpsche schilderschool, 3 vols., Antwerp 1883, pp. 469-74; Vander Auwera in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, 34 vols., Basingstoke 1996, pp. 898-99