Jan van den Hecke

His son, known as Jan van den Hecke the Younger, was born in 1661 and became a popular painter of flowers and of other types of still life as well as of landscapes.

[8] Jan van den Hecke made a number of works in a distinctively Flemish genre, which is referred to as 'garland painting'.

Garland paintings are a special type of still life developed in early 17th century Antwerp by Jan Brueghel the Elder at the instigation of the Italian cardinal Federico Borromeo.

[9] It 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.

[11] A collaboration with the figure painter Jan Lievens is the Portrait of a Young Man in Flower Garland (c. 1642–1644, Kunsthistorisches Museum).

[12] Van den Hecke also painted still lifes of game with dogs in the style of Jan Fyt and pronkstillevens with ostentatious objects, a genre invented in Antwerp.

[15] Other of his landscapes tend towards the genre scenes painted by the group of Flemish and Dutch painters in Rome known as the Bamboccianti.

[16] The Bamboccianti comprised mostly Dutch and Flemish artists who had brought existing traditions of depicting peasant subjects from sixteenth-century Netherlandish art with them to Italy,[17] and generally created small cabinet paintings or etchings of the everyday life of the lower classes in Rome and its countryside.

It was dedicated to van den Hecke's patron in Rome, Paolo Giordano II Orsini, the duke of Bracciano.

[7][20] He made a topographical drawing of the Castle of Reet that was engraved by Jacob Neefs as an illustration in the Antwerp historian Jacob Le Roy's Notitia Marchionatus Sacri Romani Imperii (published in Amsterdam by Albertus Magnus and printed by Frans Lamminga, 1678), a book with engravings of secular and religious landmarks or points of interest in the Spanish Netherlands.