Joannes Fijt

A student of Frans Snyders, Joannes Fijt (also known as Jan Fyt) became a master in the Antwerp guild of St. Luke in 1629-30. Having lived and worked in Paris, Venice, Rome and Naples, from 1641 he worked primarily in Antwerp, where he became a leading painter of still lifes. His drawings are extremely rare: in her 1956/1983 account of Fijt's life and work, Edith Greindl only accepted fourteen as authentic works by the artist¹, and few more have come to light since that time. The appearance of this large, impressive and very well preserved sheet, closely comparable in handling to drawings by the artist in the British Museum² and the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut³, is therefore of considerable significance. It has been suggested that this grand drawing – arguably the finest by the artist that has survived – may have been made as a design for a tapestry, a type of drawing that several of Fijt’s Flemish contemporaries, particularly Jacob Jordaens, made with some regularity, but it could also have been a study for a large painting, or simply an independent work in its own right.  

1. E. Greindl, Les peintres flamands de nature morte au XVII^e siècle, Brussels 1956/Paris 1983

2. Inv. no. Gg,2.279; W. Bernt, 'Die Niederländischen Zeichner des 17. Jahrhunderts', I, 1957, no. 241, fig. 241

3.  Greindl, op. cit., 1983, no. 295; reproduced A.-M. Logan, Flemish Drawings in the Age of Rubens, Selected Works from American Collections, exh. cat., Wellesley, Davis Museum and Cultural Center, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, 1993-4, no. 25