Jan van Kessel the Elder

Jan van Kessel the Elder was a Flemish painter active in Antwerp in the mid-17th century. A versatile artist, he practiced in many genres including studies of insects, floral still lifes, marines, river landscapes, paradise landscapes, allegorical compositions, scenes with animals and genre scenes. A scion of the Brueghel family many of his subjects took inspiration of the work of his grandfather Jan Brueghel the Elder as well as from the earlier generation of Flemish painters such as Daniel Seghers, Joris Hoefnagel and Frans Snyders. Van Kessel's works were highly prized by his contemporaries and were collected by skilled artisans, wealthy merchants, nobles and foreign luminaries throughout Europe.

Jan van Kessel produced a great number of studies of animals such as insects, caterpillars and reptiles as well as images of flowers and rare objects from all over the known world. He showed himself to be a keen observer and his animal studies were praised in his day for their meticulousness and precision. His work in this field reflects the contemporary worldview in which the appreciation of art and nature went hand in hand. That same desire to collect and categorize the natural world, which had given impetus to the creation of the Kunstkammern and Wunderkammern in the late 16th and 17th century, inspired the artists of the day to achieve the same in painted form. Jan van Kessel's grandfather Jan Brueghel the Elder had already demonstrated in his work how artists, starting from empirical observation, could represent the world through ordering and classifying its many elements.

An important influence on his animal studies was the scientific naturalism of the Flemish artist Joris Hoefnagel known primarily for his illuminated manuscripts and still lifes on vellum. Hoefnagel's studies of flowers and insects were engraved and published under the title Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii by his son Jacob Hoefnagel in 1592 in Frankfurt. The book is a collection of 48 engravings of plants, insects and small animals shown ad vivum made after studies by Joris Hoefnagel and was very influential on next generations of animal painters.

Van Kessel's animal studies distinguish themselves from the dispassionate approach of his predecessors, who arranged the various flora and fauna in rows, as if they were specimens in a collector's cabinet. Van Kessel put greater emphasis on composition and aesthetic without abandoning an accurate depiction of the individual creature in question. An example of this approach is the work A still life study of insects on a sprig of rosemary with butterflies, a bumble bee, beetles and other insects. In this composition van Kessel created a dynamic arrangement with insects around a single sprig of rosemary, which gives the illusion that the butterflies and bee are conversing. Despite the absence of a moralizing text, as found in the Archetypa of Hoefnagel, van Kessel's message of nature as a mirror of God's power would have been clear to his audience.

His studies of flora and fauna were often executed in large sets and occasionally served as the drawer fronts of collector's cabinets that were used for displaying objects in Wunderkammern. Unlike the dried and pinned samples stored within these cabinets, van Kessel's painted subjects appear very much alive and are clearly intended to surprise and delight the viewer upon opening the outer doors. Jan van Kessel started painting these works in the first half of the 1650s and the earliest dated examples were painted in 1653. While some of these works were executed on panel, the majority were painted on copper. Copper provided the smooth surface best suited to his meticulous and detailed finish.

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