22 Facts About Joachim Wtewael

Joachim Wtewael was trained in the style of late 16th-century Haarlem Mannerism and remained essentially faithful to it, despite painting well into the early period of Dutch Golden Age painting.

Joachim Wtewael painted a mixture of large paintings on canvas, and tiny cabinet paintings on copper plates, the latter the more numerous and typically the most distinctive.

Joachim Wtewael was very prosperous as a merchant of flax, which no doubt occupied much of his time, but was famous as a painter in his own day, with his reputation reaching as far as Prague, where Emperor Rudolf II obtained his The Golden Age.

Joachim Wtewael had several children, and seems to have stopped painting for almost the last decade of his life, perhaps influenced by the illness and death of his wife.

Joachim Wtewael's best known work, and almost his largest, is the near life-size Perseus and Andromeda in the Louvre.

Joachim Wtewael was born and spent almost all of his life in Utrecht, where he died.

Joachim Wtewael was the son of a glassmaker and glass painter who had settled in Utrecht in 1566.

Joachim Wtewael began his career in Utrecht, according to Carel van Mander, as a glassmaker and glass engraver in his father's workshop.

Joachim Wtewael never lived elsewhere, and seems never to have travelled outside the Netherlands again.

Joachim Wtewael married Christina Wtewael van Halen, whose portrait of 1601 makes a pair with the self-portrait illustrated.

Joachim Wtewael's dated paintings stretch from 1592 to 1628, taking him from the age of 26 to 62.

Joachim Wtewael was on the town council in 1610 and was later awarded a seat for life by the Stadtholder Maurice, Prince of Orange for his loyalty against the Remonstrants.

Joachim Wtewael trained with the Haarlem Mannerist Joos de Beer, who trained Abraham Bloemaert, from Utrecht and born the same year as Wtewael.

Bloemaert's later career in Utrecht contrasted strongly with Joachim Wtewael's in that he was an important teacher, with whom most of the Utrecht Caravaggisti trained at least for a while.

Joachim Wtewael changed his style significantly, reflecting newer influences from Italy and the Netherlands itself.

In contrast, apart from his son Peter, Joachim Wtewael had only three recorded painting apprentices, and was without any assistance for long intervals.

Joachim Wtewael was thus one of the founding generation of Utrecht painting; previously the city had been a centre for sculpture, as befitted a city governed by its bishop, but not known for painting.

Joachim Wtewael's style remained largely unchanged, although his colours shifted from the acidic pastels of his earlier work to stronger shades after about 1615, and some influence from the style of Caravaggio can be detected in later works.

Joachim Wtewael painted a few half-length imaginary paintings of saints or gods, singly or in small groups, such as a set of the Four Evangelists that are now dispersed in various collections.

Joachim Wtewael had other means of creating a sensuous atmosphere, such as the suggestive pink mouths of large shells that often lie on the ground below nude females, as in the Louvre Andromeda or the National Gallery Judgement of Paris.

Anne Lowenthal, the most dedicated scholar of Joachim Wtewael, has analysed his several depictions of Lot and his Daughters, dating from several periods of his career, and proposes that his treatments are designed to allude to various different possible interpretations of the biblical story, and to pose a "moral dilemma" for the viewer.

Joachim Wtewael's treatments are not without realist elements; the furniture, metalware, and other props are often carefully depicted versions of the luxury products of his own day, and the faces of his Olympians often un-idealized and very Dutch-looking, so that the viewer "often has the sense of seeing flesh and blood figures in bizarre circumstances rather than fantasies tinged by observations from life".