Jacob Grimmer

Grimmer was a capable colorist who was able to create harmonic landscapes by using realistic colours and atmospheric values effectively.

The only documentary evidence relating to Grimmer's training is his registration in 1539 under the name Iaques Grimmaer in the liggeren of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke as a student of Gabriel Bouwens.

[3] As early as 1550 Jacob Grimmer was praised by the famous Italian art historian Vasari as one of the best landscape painters of his time.

[7] Karel van Mander described Grimmer as 'such an outstanding landscape painter that in some respects I do not know a better one, so lively and lovely were his skies'.

[9] Jacob Grimmer was an active member of the local chamber of rhetoric Violieren where he was celebrated as a poet and author of comic writings.

In his earliest landscape drawing of a View over a tree-covered hill towards a village on a river (1573, Kunsthalle Hamburg) and in the series of paintings of the Four Seasons (1577, Museum of Fine Arts (Budapest) Jacob Grimmer showed a preference for depicting realistic flat Flemish landscapes with villages and farmhouses and populated with rural residents.

[7] The small figures in these scenes are set in graduated zones of recession along rolling hills towards a horizon in the middle of the panel.

Grimmer abandoned the contrived world landscape of the earlier generation in favour of a simplicity and authenticity never seen before.

[2] He had his own style of representing trees, which rise thinly against the background with spare crowns of foliage and each leaf drawn individually.

[9] Although his stylistic development is still little understood, in his late works anecdotal details decreased markedly and were replaced by intimate views of the landscape.

An example is his panoramic View of the Kiel (1578, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp) where the city appears only on the far-right distance.

An example is a pair of landscapes representing 'Spring' and 'Winter', which may have been part of a cycle on the seasons (Auctioned at Sotheby's, London on 3 December 2008, lot 7).

Another series of 24 views of sites around Brussels engraved by Hans Collaer and first issued in Antwerp in the 1580s is likely also based on drawings by Grimmer.

The first two of the prints were based on the landscape backgrounds in two drawings with Hagar, Ishmael and the Angel (1586, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).