Jacob Jordaens and Workshop

Anonymous sale, Brussels, Palais des Beaux Arts, 30 November 1936, lot 179 (as Jacob Jordaens);
In the possession of the present owners' family since the 1950s.

Although much of this painting is undoubtedly by the hand of a workshop assistant, certain passages, and in particular the principal figure of King Caspar kneeling in the foreground, is of a much higher quality and displays the confidence and painterly brio that marks it out as from the hand of Jordaens himself.

Jordaens based his many adaptations of this subject on a full-scale altarpiece by Rubens, made for St Michael's Abbey in Antwerp.¹ There, the rustic male kneeling in the right foreground also features in the picture now in the Raleigh Museum in North Carolina,² whilst the richly-adorned Caspar is the same figure, but shown at a sharper angle, as that in the altarpiece formerly in Dixmuide, for which a modello still exists.³

1. Adoration of the Magi, oil on panel, 447 x 336 cm. See E. Vandamme (ed.), Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerpen: Catalogus Schilderkunst oude Meesters, Antwerp 1988, p. 319, cat. no. 298, reproduced.
2. The Adoration of the Shepherds, oil on canvas, 284.5 x 203.5 cm. Raleigh, North Carolina Museum of Art. See R.-A. d’Hulst, Jacob Jordaens, London 1982, p. 247, reproduced fig. 217.
3. The Adoration of the Magi, oil on canvas, 156.5 x 115 cm., Kassel, Staatliche Gemäldegalerie. See d’Hulst, op. cit., p. 165, reproduced fig. 165.