Allegory of Music

Jacob Jordaens was the first-born child of a wealthy cloth merchant. At the age of fourteen he began to study painting with his future father-in-law, Adam van Noort. In 1615, Jordaens became a member of the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke, to which he would be appointed dean six years later. Initially working as a waterschilder, or watercolorist, Jordaens, with his artistic talent recognized and with profit in mind, soon devoted himself to painting in oil. Arising as the most prominent artist in the southern Netherlands after the death of Rubens, Jordaens developed an idiosyncratic style that tempered the Baroque rhetoric with a vernacular formality, which was much appreciated by his bourgeois patrons. Indeed, aside from a limited number of royal commissions from the northern courts, Jordaens’s clientele sprung from the prosperous, yet culturally less refined burgher class, far less dogmatic in their artistic requirements.

A prolific draftsman, Jordaens made numerous preparatory drawings in a wide spectrum of stylistic and technical moods, perhaps reflecting the length and success of his career. Characterized by the painterly use of wash, his works on paper are concerned less with line than with atmospheric effect. This sheet, which represents an allegory of music, is similar, in both style, technique and subject matter, to two other allegorical drawings, namely Allegory of Fruitfulness now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and Allegory of the Month of March now in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg (see R.A. d’Hulst, Jordaens Drawings, New York, 1974, vol. I, no. A244, and vol. II, no. A361).