Maerten de Vos the Elder Antwerp 1532 - 1603

Maerten de Vos was the leading Antwerp history painter in the last quarter of the 16th Century, and had a large and successful practice.  This picture has much in common with the large cycle of paintings commissioned from De Vos by Herzog Wilhelm von Braunschweig-Lüneburg for his Lutheran Schloßkapelle, Celle, of which one panel is dated 1569, and which includes panels depicting the Fall and the Expulsion (see A. Zweite, Marten de Vos als Maler, Berlin 1980, pp. 85-146 (chapters II & III), 270-278, nos. 18-38, especially nos. 33 & 35, reproduced figs. 39, 44).

Although the present picture was probably partly painted in conjunction with studio assistants, Maerten de Vos does not seem to have used a specialist animal painter in any of his paintings, and probably painted many of the animals in the present work himself.  They recall the large panels, most of which are signed, depicting individual animals: Leopard, Elephant, Unicorn, Dromedary, Lion, Stag; painted by De Vos in 1572 for Herzog Johann Albrecht I von Mecklenburg, and now divided between the Staatliches Museum in Schwerin and the Mittelrheinisches Landesmuseum, Mainz (see Zweite, op. cit., pp. 283-4, nos. 48-53, reproduced figs. 57-62).  The Unicorn in particular is remarkably similar, and the Mecklenburg panels have very similar freely brushed-in trees in the background.  Consequently, it would seem reasonable to date the present picture to the 1570s, and it is thus probable, though by no means certain, that De Vos was influenced by Frans Pourbus' several depictions of this subject, rather than vice versa (see for example the panel formerly with Jean-Max Tassel, Paris; reproduced in colour in J. Briels, Peintres flamands au berceau du Siècle d'Or hollandais, 2nd ed., Antwerp 1997, p. 145, fig. 215).  Both artists may well have enjoyed a common source in the zoological watercolours, drawn from life in Antwerp around 1550, of Hans Verhagen; his elephant is remarkably similar to the one grazing in the present picture (see Briels, op. cit., p. 144, reproduced fig. 213).