Justus van Egmont
1601–1674 · Southern Netherlands · Baroque, Flemish Baroque
The story
Early in 1648 a group of painters and sculptors in Paris founded the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, a body meant to free them from the control of the old guild of masters. Twelve of them were chosen as elders to run it, and one of the twelve was a Fleming, Justus van Egmont.
He was born in Leiden in 1601 and grew up in Antwerp, where he was apprenticed in 1615 to the painter Gaspar van den Hoecke. In the 1620s he worked in the studio of Rubens and took part in the great cycle on the life of Marie de' Medici, the queen mother of France, painted for her palace in Paris. By around 1630 he had moved to France himself, and from 1635 he was a court painter to the House of Orléans, the family of the king's brother.
In 1653 he returned to Antwerp with his family. Besides portraits he designed cartoons for tapestry, full-size patterns for woven series on the emperor Augustus, on Cleopatra and on Zenobia, the queen of Palmyra. He died in Antwerp on 8 January 1674.
