He was a prolific artist who created biblical, mythological, and allegorical compositions, genre scenes, landscapes, illustrations of Flemish sayings and portraits.

Unlike those illustrious contemporaries he never travelled abroad to study the Antique and Italian painting and, except for a few short trips to locations elsewhere in the Low Countries, he resided in Antwerp his entire life.

Only late in his career did he receive royal commissions, including from King Charles I of England, Queen Christina of Sweden and the stadtholder class of the Dutch Republic.

It is likely that he received the advantages of the education usually provided for children of his social class as is demonstrated by his clear handwriting, competence in French and thorough knowledge of mythology.

Rubens realized this important commission with the assistance of a large number of Antwerp painters such as David Teniers the Younger, Cornelis de Vos, Jan Cossiers, Peter Snayers, Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert, Theodoor van Thulden, Jan Boeckhorst, Peeter Symons, Jacob Peter Gowy and others, who worked after Rubens' modellos.

[18] Sometime during the years 1639–40, Jordaens was commissioned through Balthazar Gerbier, the English King Charles' agent in Brussels, and Cesare Alessandro Scaglia, a diplomat residing in Antwerp, to create a set of 22 paintings illustrating The Story of Cupid and Psyche.

While the works were to be displayed in the Queen's House at Greenwich upon completion, the patron and final location were unknown to Jordaens at the time he received the commission.

[20] When Jordaens submitted his initial designs to his intermediaries between himself and the English court, Gerbier was still attempting to convince the King that Rubens was a better choice for a project requiring a thorough skill in foreshortening.

[19] Efforts to complete the project continued slowly until in May 1641 all plans for The Story of Cupid and Psyche series were disrupted with the death of the diplomat Scaglia.

Amalia van Solms, widow of the Dutch Stadtholder Prince Frederick Henry of Orange invited various artists to decorate the manorial house Huis ten Bosch in The Hague which was built in 1645.

[14][23] In 1652 he painted for his 'showroom' (pronkkamer) in the south wing of his home nine ceiling pieces depicting the erotic history of the god of love Cupid and the royal daughter Psyche.

The decoration of the room was intended to impress his visitors by his mastery through the depiction of the mythological tale of earthly and heavenly love, betrayal and fidelity.

[25] In Antwerp, which was ruled by Catholic Spanish monarchs, the Protestant religion was forbidden although it should have been tolerated under the terms of the 1648 Peace of Münster which officially recognised the Dutch Republic.

He, his wife and daughter Elizabeth were members of the Calvinist congregation that had been established in Antwerp after the Peace of Münster despite the continued repression of Protestantism in the Habsburg Netherlands.

They were buried together under one tombstone in the Protestant cemetery in Putte, a village just north of the Belgian border, where his wife Catharina had been put to rest upon her death in 1659.

[14] One year after his death, Jordaens' son-in-law donated twenty-five Flemish pounds to the Camer van den Huysarmen ('Chamber of the Almoners') in Antwerp.

After 1642 the Polish artist Aleksander Jan Tricius became his pupil and in 1645 Queen Christina of Sweden intended to send her protégé Georg Waldau (Joris Waldon) to his workshop, but this plan came to nothing due to the threat of war in Flanders.

The many commissions, also from church patrons, he received after becoming the leading Flemish painter following Rubens' death resulted in a decline in the quality of his output due to an increased reliance on workshop assistance.

It is, for instance, known that for his Marsyas ill-treated by the Muses (on display at the Mauritshuis, The Hague), Jordaens relied on a French translation of the Eikones (Images) by Greek author Philostratus.

Although Jacques Jordaens did not specialize, he often repeated a theme based on a proverb that depicted a wide range of characters of a variety of ages, crowded in a festive scene around a banquet table.

[7] While Jordaens drew upon Rubens' motifs throughout his career, his work is distinguished by its greater realism, a crowding of the surface of his compositions and a preference for the burlesque, even within the context of religious and mythological subjects.

He abandoned vibrant colours in favour of a grey-blue palette, accented at times with a dull brown and applied paint so thinly that the canvas could be seen.

[7] In addition to being a well-known portrait painter, Jordaens painted biblical, mythological and allegorical subjects and landscapes and even etched a number of plates.

The owl, considered the bird of the night, perched on the older woman's wicker chair, serves as a memento mori, a reminder of mortality.

Jordaens' positioning of the eagle, the backwards, heroically nude bloodshot-eyed Prometheus as well as the depiction of the punishment and pain through spastic twisting and contorted movements, are also common themes in Rubens' version.

[41] Maintaining trends in Flemish painting, Jordaens was a proponent of extending Rubens' and Van Dyck's "painterly" style of art to his exceptionally prolific body of preparatory drawings.

Jordaens and his contemporaries were proponents of the Flemish trend towards making, expanding, and modifying preparatory drafts for larger paintings or to add to their visual vocabulary the classical artistic ideals.

Like Rubens and van Dyck before him, he realised the important role the print medium could play in distributing his work and raising his international fame.

The grounds for the revised attribution is that the said prints do not show the typical features of Jordaens' style as displayed in his paintings and drawings but rather exhibit the characteristics and weaknesses of Eynhoudt's known oeuvre.

[44] Jordaens had a particularly close collaboration with the printmaker Marinus Robyn van der Goes who as a result created many prints after his works such as the Heracles and Cacus.