Robert Wenley

Accompanying an exhibition at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts - only the second exhibition ever devoted to the artist - this noteworthy publication considers De Beer’s work and career, working methods, and traces the history of De Beer’s paintings in British collections. The Antwerp painter Jan de Beer (c.1475-1527/28) was highly esteemed in his lifetime and still famous a couple of generations after his death, but then fell into oblivion until the early twentieth century. Only recently have his achievements been fully recognized and documented. The artist’s known oeuvre consists of forty works, mainly devotional paintings and triptychs but also a dozen drawings and a stained glass window, after a lost design. De Beer’s stylish and elegant art appealed to patrons and collectors, churches abroad, and copyists. His work is typically associated with that of the Antwerp Mannerists, a prominent group of mostly anonymous painters active in the city during his lifetime. This publication will accompany an exhibition at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham (25 October 2019 to 19 January 2020) that focuses on one of its and De Beer’s acknowledged masterpieces: the double-sided Joseph and the Suitors/ The Nativity. This is the only surviving fragment from what must have been a major altarpiece. It will be accompanied by a half-dozen key loans of paintings and drawings by De Beer and his workshop including all the attributed paintings in UK collections. These will provide both an instructive context for the Barber painting and for De Beer’s art more generally, with the whole chronological range of his career represented. It will be only the second ever exhibition devoted to De Beer, and the first to show the broad range of his work. The fully-illustrated catalog will feature extended entries for all the exhibited works and three essays exploring the core themes of the show, written by Robert Wenley, Head of Collections at the Barber Institute and the lead curator of the exhibition, and two leading De Beer specialists. Professor Dan Ewing (Barry University, Miami Shores, Florida) will consider De Beer’s work and career; while Peter van den Brink (Director, Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum, Aachen) will explore De Beer’s working methods, in particular as revealed by the underdrawings of his pictures. Robert Wenley’s essay will survey the history of De Beer’s paintings in British collections.

Full of humanity and even humour, the Old Testament paintings by master visual storyteller Jan Steen are often treated like incidents in 17th-century Holland. This groundbreaking examination considers the influence of Jewish history and Dutch theatre on this exciting element of his oeuvre. The Leiden-born artist Jan Steen (1626–1679) is widely admired as one of the most engaging and technically brilliant painters of the Dutch Golden Age. This volume accompanies an exhibition that will be the first in the UK devoted to Steen’s Old Testament subjects. The focal point will be his magnificent Wrath of Ahasuerus (c.1668–69), one of the highlights of the Barber’s collection, which will be joined by a number of other paintings by Steen from private and public collections across the world. Three essays will examine the core themes of the show – the role of Jewish history in Steen’s Old Testament scenes; the influence of Dutch theatre on his work; and the critical response to his Old Testament paintings from the 17th century to date. Robert Wenley (Barber Institute of Fine Arts) will look at how the Dutch nation established its identity in part by associating its people with the Biblical Israelites, seeing themselves as persecuted by the Spanish for their faith. He will explore the popularity of the story of Esther and other Old Testament subjects in Dutch culture – in plays as well as paintings – and the possibility of Jewish patrons for Steen’s Old Testament paintings. Nina Cahill (University of Kassel) will put forward new research about how Steen adopted the gestural language of contemporary Dutch theatre, amateur and professional, in order to represent the key figures in these scenes and to convey the pivotal dramatic moments. In some instances, Steen may have been quoting from an actual production of a play based on the Biblical story. Rosalie van Gulick (Utrecht University) will consider how Steen’s Old Testament scenes have been received and understood over the years. She will investigate how the apparent farcical character of these scenes has been understood over the centuries and why they have prompted adversely critical responses from some modern art historians.