Page 42 - Jordaens

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pentimenti shows him developing his ideas c. 1616-18, which culminated in a group of masterpieces, of
which one at Cassel has been dated c. 1623-25. A starting point for Jordaens may have been a print by Marcus
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Gheeraerts the Elder (1557-1629). But he was to reject the high viewpoint and although he first conceived
the scene as an upright in which the ceiling of a barn is depicted, he preferred the challenge of describing it
from below and close- up in such a way that the legs of the furniture and the protagonists require disentangling.
He chose bright, slanting lighting with shadows and rearranged the protagonists in the varying versions so as
to find different ways to express the effect of the
words of the truth-speaking satyr. About twenty

years later the artist’s interest in the potential of
gatherings at table was revived in his renderings
of the The King Drinks and As the old sing, so the
young pipe, the hilarious scenes of family life for
which Jordaens is famous.

For the treatment in the Odysseus series,
Jordaens may have referred to the print after
Rubens’ Supper at Emmaus of 1611 by Willem
van Swanenburg (1581-1612), the prototype of
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which is lost (Fig. 12). In particular, he may
have been struck by the disciple seen from behind,
who leans forward as Christ reveals himself. This
was to be the inspiration for his formulation of
Hermes, and the numerous pentimenti in the
figure show the amount of trouble he expended Fig. 12. Willem van Swanenburg after Rubens, The Last Supper.

to obtain the most expressive result. Of prime
concern was his desire to convey the god’s calm conduct of the interview, which would not have been conveyed
by the tense posture of the disciple’s right arm. He altered this, perhaps with the gesture of Paris’ right arm in

44. Matthiesen, London, Fifty Paintings 1535-1825, 1993, pp. 55-59, no.9, ill. and succeeding essay in this catalogue.
45. The print in E. de Dene’s edition of Aesop’s Fables, republished by J.Van Vondel 1617, see [Exh.Cat.] Jordaens and the Antique,
Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, 2012, no. 574.
46. D. Freedberg, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, VII, ‘The Life of Christ after the Passion,’ 1984, pp. 43-48, no. 8.

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Detail of Plate 1