Collection: Flemish Baroque

Flemish Baroque painting, centred on Antwerp under Habsburg rule, is the Counter-Reformation southern Netherlandish branch of the wider Baroque movement. It ran from approximately 1585, the year Antwerp returned to Catholic Spanish control, to the late seventeenth century. Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) dominates the period, his enormous Antwerp workshop producing altarpieces, mythologies, and diplomatic portraits across Catholic Europe.

Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641), Rubens's most accomplished pupil, carried the manner to the English court of Charles I and refined it into a new standard for European aristocratic portraiture. Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678) worked the same idiom in a more populist, often comic register, becoming Antwerp's leading painter after Rubens's death. Frans Snyders (1579–1657) specialised in animal still life and hunting scenes. Adriaen Brouwer (1605/6–1638) developed peasant genre scenes in tavern settings. David Teniers the Younger (1610–1690) extended the genre tradition into court patronage in Brussels. Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625) brought floral still life and cabinet painting to the period's high standard.