Frans Ykens

Rubens owned six still lifes by Frans Ykens. That is a fair measure of how the Antwerp trade saw him, as a reliable painter of flowers and fruit whose work other painters wanted on their own walls.

Ykens was baptised in Antwerp in 1601 and trained from the age of 14 with his uncle Osias Beert, one of the first Flemish painters to specialise in still life. After a stay in Provence, at Aix and Marseille, he became a master in the Antwerp painters' guild in 1631 and married the flower painter Catharina Floquet. Much of his work was shared. In garland pictures he painted the flowers and fruit while a figure painter supplied the scene in the middle, and his partners included Jacob Jordaens, Cornelis Schut and Thomas Willeboirts. The Flora in the Louvre is one of these, with Willeboirts's goddess framed by his garlands.

His buyers reached well beyond Antwerp. He painted for Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Habsburg governor in Brussels, and Eleanor of Austria, queen of Poland, bought his pictures through Antwerp dealers. In 1665 he moved to Brussels and worked there for the rest of his long life. In his last years he had to mortgage his property, and after his death in 1693 his belongings were sold to pay his debts.