Baroque; Gerard de la Vallée (Mechelen, 1596/'97 – Rome, after 1673), signed and dated(?) lower left: Geeraert DeLavaLLee f (1650?) Little is known about the maker of the painting, Gerard de la Vallée, and the scant information has only a hypothetical value. If de la Vallée can be identified with Gerard van den Dale – as art historian Henri Pauwels claims – he would have been born around 1596-1597 in Mechelen. According to Pauwels de la Vallée stayed in Paris in 1620. A residence that could explain the Frenchification of his name. In 1625 his presence in Mechelen was demonstrable by the commission he received to paint a 'Holy Trinity' for the Church of Our Lady across the Dyle. In 1626, the painter was registered as a free master in the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke. From that moment, his painting began to betray the influence of Rubens and his studio. Gerard de la Vallée would have died in Rome in 1673. The problematic point of the reconstruction of the painter's life is that van den Dale seems to have been mainly active as a landscape painter. Pauwels tries to explain this by assuming that the landscapes mostly date from the beginning of his career in Mechelen.
De La Vallée inspired himself for his painting 'Christ shown to the people' (Ecce Homo) on a work by Peter Paul Rubens of the mid-1630s. Rubens' oil sketch is preserved in The Hague and has a sure G. Cramer (published in the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, Part VI, The Passion of Christ by J.R.Judson, n° 14b). De Lavallée took over Rubens' central motif almost entirely. Both artists depict Christ standing on a flight of steps with his wrists bound, holding a reed and wearing a crown of thorns and a cape. The figure of Pontius Pilate pointing with both hands to Christ was given a turban on the head in the painting of de Lavallée. Both works show how a Roman soldier restrains the handcuffed thief Barrabas. Furthermore, the architecture of the entrance and some background figures are indebted to Rubens. The mass in the foreground and the dog were worked out according to de Lavallée's idea.
Because of the remarkable resemblance between the paintings of Rubens and de Lavallée, it can be assumed that the latter had access to Rubens's example. It is unlikely that de Lavallée based his painting on Nicolaes Lauwers' print engraved after Rubens' design. Firstly, the print is executed in inversion, and secondly, the architecture in print is much more baroque in appearance.
