The Parable of the Prodigal Son

Entry

The subject of the present painting is Christ’s parable of the Prodigal Son, which is recounted in Luke 15:11-32.

Van Vloten in 1874 seems to have been the first to abandon the confused and misleading ascription to Sebastian Franks which had most likely been given to the present painting since the early eighteenth century.¹¹ He described it as the work of Frans Francken II, an attribution that was accepted until challenged by Härting in 1989.¹² She then suggested that it was the work of collaboration between Frans and his brother Hieronymus who was responsible for the central, coloured depiction, and made a comparison with the signed larger-scale Ballroom in the collection of the University of Stockholm.¹³ The issue is complicated by her view that the latter results from a collaboration between Hieronymus and his homonymous uncle (1540-1610), who she believes was responsible for the lady playing the clavichord there. Although the Rijksmuseum retained the attribution to Frans alone,¹⁴ Härting’s assessment of the Amsterdam picture seems correct as a comparison between the demeanour and characteristics of the Prodigal Son and the male dancer confirms. Although there is nothing strictly comparable in Frans’s oeuvre, the fluently handled landscapes in grisaille and brunaille (rather far from the idiom of Jan Brueghel I) are acceptably his. The same episodes were executed as surrounds to another depiction of the Prodigal Son, dissipating his wealth at a dance.¹⁵ Influential in their compositions, especially that bottom centre, may have been the set of small landscapes engraved by Johannes van Doetecum I (c. 1530-1605).¹⁶

The oak of the support cannot be dated dendrochronologically. From the costumes in the central scene a date of execution from circa 1610-20 would appear likely. Open-necked, starched collars and high hats are depicted by Jacques Jordaens (1593-1678) in his group portraits in the Alte Meister Gemäldegalerie, Kassel, and the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, of circa 1615-16.¹⁷ Also similar is the costume worn by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) in his Self-Portrait with His Wife Isabella in the Munich Alte Pinakothek of 1609/10.¹⁸ Another open-necked, stiff collar later appears in Anthony van Dyck’s (1599-1641) Portrait of a Man in the Dresden Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister which probably dates from circa 1617-1618.¹⁹

In the central composition Francken emphasizes the lubricious scene of a brothel with a procuress and includes (following classical precedent) a painting of Danaë being seduced by Jupiter in the form of a shower of gold coins, and by a cat, popularly thought to be a lecherous creature which entices men to sexual intercourse.²⁰ The outer scenes follow the traditional themes of the parable as set out for instance by Réau.²¹ From the top left, clockwise, is: verse 12 ‘… Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living …’; verse 13: ‘…the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country …’; verse 13 (centre image and top right): ‘… there wasted his substance with riotous living …’; verse 16: ‘…and no man gave unto him …’; verse 15: ‘… he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent unto his fields to feed swine …’; verse 18: ‘…I will arise and go to my father, and will say until him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee …’; verse 20: ‘…he arose, and came to his father … his father had compassion …’; verse 23: ‘…bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry…’.

A notable and exceptional scene is the illustration of ‘no man gave unto him’ in which a Catholic priest (wearing a biretta) spurns the prodigal’s entreaty. On the face of it, this seemingly anti-Catholic sentiment suggests that Francken may have had a specific patron in mind, but it should be noted that the same scene was repeated in another, extant, joint Francken treatment of the parable, and occurs again in a more simplified form in the painted cabinet, by Frans Francken III, in the Rijksmuseum (BK-NM-4190). It was omitted in Frans Francken II’s grisaille surround to his 1633 treatment of the parable in Musée du Louvre, in which the central painting depicted the departure of the Prodigal Son.²²

A painted surround, or binnenlijst, was a contrivance popularized by Frans Francken II; it had been introduced by the Antwerp artist Gillis Mostaert (c. 1528/29-1598).²³ He had painted scenes on strips of wood that had been fixed to the main support. Francken simplified the device by merely ruling the demarcation lines in gold paint and a little carelessly as the lines do not meet bottom left and there is a pentiment in that at the top right.

Hieronymus Francken’s brothel scene is an early example of the ‘merry company’ genre soon to be popular in the northern Netherlands. The connection of its composition with that of the Dutch painter Willem Pietersz Buytewech’s (1591-1624) Merry Company at Berlin of 1622-24, now in the Mauritshuis,²⁴ may be fortuitous. But it could indicate that Francken’s work was early in the northern Netherlands in the possession of a dealer or collector in Rotterdam or Haarlem (where Buytewech was active); this might also explain its seemingly obvious, anti-Catholic bias. Relevant in this respect, is that the picture may have been that in the collection of the Dutchman (and likely, but not necessarily so, Protestant) Johan van Marselis (1641-1702).

Gregory Martin, 2022