Lucas Gassel
Southern Netherlands · Northern Renaissance, Flemish Renaissance, Landscape painting
The story
In 1572 the humanist Dominicus Lampsonius, secretary to the prince-bishops of Liège, published a set of 23 engraved portraits of Netherlandish painters who had died. One of them is dedicated to Lucas Gassel of Helmond, a small town in Brabant, and Lampsonius had been his friend. That plate and a handful of signed pictures are most of what remains of a painter who was well known in his own day.
Gassel was a landscape specialist, one of the painters who carried on the panoramic world landscape of Joachim Patinir, the Antwerp master, after Patinir's death in 1524. He usually signed with a monogram and a date, and about ten such panels survive, from the late 1530s to around 1560. They are wide views of rocks, rivers and towns, with a Bible story or a myth played out small in the foreground. He also made designs that the Antwerp publisher Hieronymus Cock issued as prints.
His later years were spent in Brussels, the seat of the Habsburg governors of the Netherlands. He was still alive in 1568 and had died by the time Lampsonius's book appeared.
