Hendrick de Clerck
1630 · Southern Netherlands · Mannerism, Flemish Baroque, Northern Renaissance
The story
When Archduke Albert of Austria made his entry into Brussels in 1596 as the new Habsburg governor of the Netherlands, the decorations for the triumphal arches along his route were designed by Hendrick de Clerck. He was already a court painter, a post he had held under Albert's brother, Archduke Ernest, and he went on serving Albert and his wife Isabella for decades. In 2016 M Leuven, a museum in Belgium, gave him an exhibition titled Albert and Isabella's spin doctor, because his gods and heroes so often flattered the archducal couple.
De Clerck was born around 1560, probably in Brussels, and drawings suggest he spent time in Rome and Naples in the late 1580s. He kept to the refined late Mannerism of the imperial court in Prague, the style of painters like Bartholomeus Spranger, even as his younger contemporary Rubens was changing Flemish painting. Brussels churches stripped by the iconoclasm of 1566 ordered new altarpieces from him, often triptychs. In smaller cabinet pictures he painted the figures while landscape specialists such as Denijs van Alsloot supplied the scenery, and he took up mythological feasts of the gods, among them the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. His son Jacob also became a painter, and Hendrick died in Brussels in August 1630.
