Jan Matsys

In 1544 Jan Matsys was banished from Antwerp. The city, then the richest port in northern Europe and a hotbed of religious dissent, exiled him on suspicion of Protestant sympathies, and for roughly a decade he worked abroad, in France and probably Italy, before the ban was lifted and he came home around 1555.

He carried a famous name. Jan was the elder son of Quentin Matsys, the founder of the Antwerp school of painting, and trained in his father's workshop alongside his brother Cornelis, who became an engraver. The years away changed his art. He came back painting elegant, elongated figures and mythological subjects in the manner he had picked up in France, softer and more sensual than his father's sober style.

Religion kept unsettling the family. Jan's son, another Quentin, and his daughter both left the Netherlands, one for London and one for Italy, part of the wave of Antwerp Protestants who scattered across Europe. Jan himself died in Antwerp in the mid-1570s.