Adriaen van Stalbemt
1580–1662 · Habsburg Netherlands · Flemish Baroque, Northern Renaissance, Landscape painting
The story
Adriaen van Stalbemt worked small. In an Antwerp full of Rubens-scale altarpieces, he built a career on cabinet pictures, little paintings on copper crowded with figures, meant to be set into fine furniture or hung close and studied like a jewel.
His family had fled Antwerp for the Protestant north after the Catholic reconquest of 1585, and he grew up in Middelburg before returning around 1609, when a truce with Spain reopened the city. Admitted to the painters' guild of Saint Luke in 1610, he turned out landscapes threaded with religious, mythological and allegorical scenes, and a subject then newly fashionable, the picture gallery, rooms hung frame to frame with paintings within a painting.
In 1633 King Charles I of England called him across the Channel, where he stayed about ten months and painted two views of Greenwich with the royal couple, working alongside the English painter Jan van Belcamp. Then he went back to Antwerp, where he had spent his whole life and would die in 1662, past 80.
