Joseph Van Aken

[1] Initially successful in England with his fashionable conversation pieces and other genre scenes, he gradually specialised as a drapery painter.

[3] Van Aken was a member of the second St. Martin's Lane Academy, an association of artists that gathered in the Slaughter's Coffee House in London between 1635 and 1666.

Another brother, Arnoldus, was also a painter known for small conversation pieces and a series of paintings of fish which were later engraved and published under the title The Wonders of the Deep (1736).

[3] In Antwerp van Aken painted genre scenes in the Flemish tradition such as the work the Washerwomen (1715, private collection).

[3] Upon his arrival in London he initially produced animated bourgeois interiors in subdued tonalities, such as Saying Grace (c. 1720, Ashmolean Museum).

These works were in the tradition of 17th century Flemish genre painting as developed further by contemporary Antwerp masters such as Jan Josef Horemans the Elder.

[11][12] Van Aken together with other foreign artists such as Marcellus Laroon the Younger, Philippe Mercier and Peter Angelis played a role in the development of genre paintings into conversation pieces in 1720s England.

[14] An example is the Portrait of Lady Lucy Manners (circa 1742 - 1749, National Trust, England) painted in collaboration with Thomas Hudson.

[15] Van Aken's participation in portraits in the 1730s and 1740s is evidenced by a series of drapery studies preserved in the Scottish National Gallery which relate to his collaborations with Hudson and Allan Ramsay.