Jan Baptist Borrekens
1611–1675 · Southern Netherlands · Flemish Baroque, Baroque
The story
On 30 January 1636, in Antwerp, Jan Baptist Borrekens married Catharina Brueghel, a daughter of Jan Brueghel the Elder. Rubens signed the register as a witness. Catharina's sister was married to David Teniers the Younger, so the wedding tied Borrekens into the closest thing Flemish painting had to a family firm.
He had been a master in the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke since the guild year 1629, when he was about 18. In that same year of the wedding, Philip IV of Spain commissioned Rubens to fill a hunting lodge outside Madrid, the Torre de la Parada, with scenes from Ovid, and Rubens made small oil sketches and handed the enlarging out to a crowd of Antwerp painters. Borrekens took one of them, and his Apotheosis of Hercules, painted after Rubens's design, is the only picture securely identified as his today.
Most of his money came from dealing rather than from the brush. He owned paintings by the leading Flemish masters of the century and tapestries as well, and he died in Antwerp in 1675, at 63.
