Jan Wellens de Cock

[1] Recent discoveries and a re-evaluation of the links between the works attributed to Wellens de Cock and those of contemporaneous artists of Leiden have caused a large portion and potentially all of the works formerly attributed to him to be re-attributed to one or more anonymous artists active in Antwerp or Leiden referred to by the notname Pseudo Jan Wellens de Cock or Master J. Kock or some other anonymous artists believed to have worked in Leiden in the studio or immediate circle of Cornelis Engebrechtsz.

In 1507 de Cock was paid for painting angels and restoring the Holy Ghost at the altar of this guild in Antwerp Cathedral.

[1] These works were probably lost in the iconoclastic destruction of mainly religious images and statues known as the beeldenstorm that raged in parts of the Low Countries in 1566.

In 1520 Jan de Cock served as a dean of the Guild of Saint Luke, together with Joos van Cleve.

His wife Clara van Beeringen is mentioned as a widow in 1521 in the reports of the brotherhood of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw-Lof in Antwerp, which means that he must have died in 1520 or 1521.

[1] Friedländer constructed an entire oeuvre around the artist based on an anonymous print depicting Saint Christopher carrying the Christ Child.

[2] Many of the works that Friedländer attributed to de Cock have since been reassigned by Dutch art historians Nicolaas Beets, Godefridus Johannes Hoogewerff, Jan Piet Filedt Kok and others, to some of Engebrechtsz's pupils, such as his sons Cornelis Cornelisz and Lucas Cornelisz named De Cock.