Jan van Kessel the Elder

[2] Van Kessel's works were highly prized by his contemporaries and were collected by skilled artisans, wealthy merchants, nobles and foreign luminaries throughout Europe.

[6] Attribution of work to Jan van Kessel the Elder has been difficult due to confusion with other artists with a similar name all active around the same time.

[10] Jan van Kessel produced a great number of studies of animals such as insects, caterpillars and reptiles as well as images of flowers and rare objects from all over the known world.

That same desire to collect and categorize the natural world, which had given impetus to the creation of the Kunstkammern and Wunderkammern in the late 16th and 17th century, inspired the artists of the day to achieve the same in painted form.

[12] An important influence on his animal studies was the scientific naturalism of the Flemish artist Joris Hoefnagel known primarily for his illuminated manuscripts and still lifes on vellum.

[13] Van Kessel's animal studies distinguish themselves from the dispassionate approach of his predecessors, who arranged the various flora and fauna in rows, as if they were specimens in a collector's cabinet.

In this composition van Kessel created a dynamic arrangement with insects around a single sprig of rosemary, which gives the illusion that the butterflies and bee are conversing.

Despite the absence of a moralizing text, as found in the Archetypa of Hoefnagel, van Kessel's message of nature as a mirror of God's power would have been clear to his audience.

[11][14] His studies of flora and fauna were often executed in large sets and occasionally served as the drawer fronts of collector's cabinets that were used for displaying objects in Wunderkammern.

Unlike the dried and pinned samples stored within these cabinets, van Kessel's painted subjects appear very much alive and are clearly intended to surprise and delight the viewer upon opening the outer doors.

As objects that depict treasures from different parts of the world and are themselves composed of materials from faraway places, van Kessel's pictures of the continents would have held particular significance for his elite audience of artisans, merchants, connoisseurs and foreign dignitaries.

Van Kessel's The four parts of the world is known to have been appreciated by contemporary viewers as a demonstration of his artistic skill and virtuosity, which were qualities that were highly prized by collectors.

All of the pictures follow a similar same compositional scheme: a view of a city is seen in the background while a close-up of large animals of various species makes up the foreground.

This scheme was characteristic for 16th-century graphic artists such as Joris Hoefnagel and Adriaen Collaert, who are known to have been a source of inspiration for Van Kessel's work more generally.

[15] Van Kessel's grandfather Jan Brueghel the Elder played a key role in the invention and development of the genre of garland paintings in the first two decades of the 17th century.

[17] The genre was further inspired by the cult of veneration and devotion to Mary prevalent at the Habsburg court (then the rulers over the Southern Netherlands) and in Antwerp generally.

An example of a collaborative garland painting made by Jan van Kessel and David Teniers the Younger is the composition The soap bubbles (c. 1660–1670, Louvre).

In this work Jan van Kessel painted a decorative garland representing the four elements around a cartouche showing a young man blowing soap bubbles, which symbolizes vanity, i.e. the transience of life.