page_title: Jan van Kessel the Younger
section_title: Portraits
hierarchical_section_title: Jan van Kessel the Younger / Work / Portraits
context_page_description: Jan van Kessel the Younger or Jan van Kessel II, known in Spain as Juan Vanchesel el Mozo or el Joven, was a Flemish painter who after training in Antwerp worked in Spain. Known mainly for his portraits he became a court painter to the King and Queen of Spain. A few landscapes and mythological and allegorical scenes have also been attributed to him. He was formerly believed to have been active as a still life painter, but this is now no longer generally accepted.
context_section_description: Van Kessel's main duty as a court painter was to paint portraits of the royal family and in particular the queen. His portrait style was described by his contemporary Antonio Palomino as very close to that of his fellow Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck. Upon his arrival in Spain he seems to have followed the style of royal portraiture introduced by Diego Velázquez and continued by Claudio Coello.  These portraits were characterized by their simplicity of shapes and color which included hardly any props or symbols and set off the sitter against a neutral background.  This influence of the local Spanish portrait tradition is visible in the Portrait of Maria Anna of Neuburg (1690, private collection in Madrid).  He abandoned this style in the Portrait of Maria Anna of Neuburg by adding more color and a view into a landscape in the background.  This work forms a pair with the Portrait of Charles II of Spain.  The two oval works had originally been part of a larger square painting representing flower garlands which would have encircled the oval portrait.   He had already commenced his innovation of Spanish court portraiture in the Portrait of Maria Nicolasa de la Cerda (c. 1685, Ministry of Public Administration, Madrid) in which he used vivid color and played with the contrast between a clear light and carefully placed shadows.  Some portrait paintings have been attributed to him on stylistic grounds by comparing it to his signed paintings.  This is the case of the Portrait of Marie Louise d’Orléans, which is still listed as by an unknown painter on the Prado Museum website.
  Van Kessel was a specialist of the genre of group portraits. An example is the Portrait of a family in a garden in the Prado Museum, which depicts a Flemish gentleman (believed to be a protector or patron of van Kessel) with his family.  The symbolic intent of the work is to praise family life and family virtues such as fidelity.  The guitar playing man symbolises family harmony and the dog the virtue of fidelity.  The mature woman surrounded by the small children symbolizes the virtue of charity while the young couple holding hands represent conjugal love. The painting includes a self-portrait of the artist who is leaning out of a window in the background to the right.  A slightly different version of the work, painted in the same year as the Prado version, is in the National Museum in Warsaw.
  
  He was also known as a painter of small portraits. Such works were very much in vogue among the higher nobility of that period. They were treated as intimate objects that were regaled between family members as well as friends and were therefore in a less formal style than the official portraits.  They had the advantage that they could be carried easily by their owners as an object to remember their loved ones by. The first known small portrait he made was the effigy of Charles II (now lost) which was placed in the "big jewel" that the king gave to his spouse Maria Anna of Neuburg as a matrimonial present upon his arrival in Spain in 1690. Another example are the pair of small portraits of Charles II of Spain and Maria Anna of Neuburg (Colección Abelló, Madrid), which are less formal than traditional official portraits. A pair of small portraits of the royal couple are also attributed to him in the Lázaro Galdiano Museum and were likely created to be sent to the Russian court as a diplomatic gift as it shows the king in armor. In another pair of small portraits in a private collection, dated between 1696 and 1700, Charles II of Spain is represented as Saint Ferdinand and Maria Anna of Neuburg as Saint Helena.  A further pair of small portraits of the royal couple are in the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas in Madrid. Two small effigies of Philip V of Spain and his spouse Maria Luisa of Savoy, dated around 1701, are in the collection of the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid.
caption: Still life with fish, vegetables, flowers and two cats, formerly attributed to Jan van Kessel the Younger and now to Pseudo-Jan van Kessel the Younger[11]
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