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Description: | Signed: yes Description: Abraham Bloemaert (1564-1651) was born at Groningen near Dordrecht. He moved to Utrecht where he found great success as a teacher and influenced several generations of artists. Unlike many of his pupils he never travelled to Italy but did visit France 1580-83 and Amsterdam 1591-93. Under the influence of the new styles brought back from Rome by his pupils his style moved from Mannerism towards Classicism, after about 1600 he concentrated on landscape subjects with peasant dwellings and tumbledown farmhouses executed in a more typically Dutch idiom. The present painting is a fine example of Bloemaert's late style. Here the principle subject of the scene, the biblical story of the Prodigal Son (taken from Luke 15. 11-32) is confined to the small figures in the background while everyday rural figures are represented large in the foreground so as to emphasise how religious events may pass un-noticed in the every day world. Bloemaert treated this subject on several occasions, he first produced designs of the subject for engravings produced by Jan Saenredam (1565-1607), these were then taken up for undated paintings at Berlin and Leamington Spa Museums; two drawings exist for certain architectural details in the Suffolk collection painting. | Subjects: | landscape; religion (Prodigal Son as Swinherd) | Source: | Vads | Creator: | Artist: Bloemaert, Abraham (Dutch painter and draftsman, 1566-1651) Æ | Identifier: | http://www.vads.ac.uk/large.php?uid=8726... | Go to resource |
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