Adriaen van Utrecht
1599–1652 · Habsburg Netherlands · Baroque, Flemish Baroque, Still life painting
The story
Adriaen van Utrecht painted plenty for a living, and for a while it made him rich. Born in Antwerp in 1599, he came home in 1625 after years working for courts in France, Italy and Germany, and set up as a specialist in the sumptuous Flemish still life they called a pronkstilleven, a show-off piece. Tables loaded with game, fruit, silver and live animals, all crowded together to display sheer abundance.
He and the older Frans Snyders are considered the two painters who really invented that genre, and van Utrecht often worked alongside artists from Rubens's circle, who added the human figures to his heaps of food. Commissions came from the Holy Roman Emperor, from Philip the Fourth of Spain and from the Prince of Orange, and he lived on the Meir, the grandest street in Antwerp.
Then his luck turned. Through the late 1640s, in poor health, he lost most of what he had made, and by his death in 1652 most of that wealth was gone.
