The Bean king

1621–1667

His workshop: fifteen pupils in the guild records

Between 1621 and 1667 the guild registered fifteen pupils with Jordaens (the best known being Jan Boeckhorst), and six more are named in court documents; his son Jacob and his cousin Arnoldus also trained with him. His fame drew foreigners: after 1642 the Polish painter Aleksander Jan Tricius became his pupil, and in 1645 Queen Christina of Sweden meant to send her protégé Georg Waldau, but the threat of war in Flanders prevented it.

c. 1635 – 1645

Publishes prints after his own designs

Like Rubens and van Dyck, Jordaens realised that prints spread an artist's fame and on his own initiative issued 14 engravings under privilege (cum privilegio), cut by Marinus Robyn van der Goes, Schelte a Bolswert, Paulus Pontius and other Antwerp engravers. Beneath each image stood his name as inventor and a short explanation in Latin verse.

1637–1638

Paintings for Philip IV's hunting lodge

In 1636 Rubens received a commission for a mythological series after Ovid's Metamorphoses for the Torre de la Parada near Madrid and enlisted Antwerp painters. Jordaens painted “Apollo and Pan” (1637, after a sketch by Rubens) and “Vertumnus and Pomona” (1638).

1639

Buys “De Halle van Lier” and rebuilds his home

Jordaens bought the large house “De Halle van Lier” (“Turnhoutsche Halle”) at Hoogstraat 43, opposite his home, and turned the three houses into one large complex: he designed the façades of the inner courtyard in the manner of Rubens's house and decorated the rooms with sculpture, carpets and fine furniture. He lived and worked there until his death.

1639–1640

Charles I's commission: “The Story of Cupid and Psyche”

Through the English king's agent in Brussels, Balthazar Gerbier, and the diplomat Cesare Alessandro Scaglia, Jordaens received a commission for 22 paintings for the Queen's House at Greenwich without knowing the patron or the destination; when Rubens, Gerbier's preferred choice, died on 30 May 1640, the whole commission passed to Jordaens. But Scaglia died in May 1641, only eight paintings reached the English court, and a dispute with his heirs over payment for seven of them dragged on into the next generation.

1640–1641

After Rubens's death, Antwerp's leading painter

With the deaths of Rubens in 1640 and van Dyck in 1641, Jordaens became the leading painter of Antwerp, and commissions came increasingly from abroad; Rubens's heirs asked him to finish “Perseus and Andromeda” for Philip IV. He never became a court painter: he worked mainly for wealthy townspeople and the clergy.