page_title: Pieter Pourbus
section_title: The 1570s
hierarchical_section_title: Pieter Pourbus / Life / Later years and death / The 1570s
caption_attribution_description: English: The Lamentation by Pieter Jansz. Pourbus, oil on panel, Schorr Collection
context_page_description: Pieter Jansz. Pourbus was a Flemish Renaissance painter, draftsman, engineer and cartographer who was active in Bruges during the 16th century. He is known primarily for his religious and portrait paintings.
context_section_description: After the enormous effort of the Great Map, Pourbus once again was able to take on regular commissions. During this time, his students began to leave his studio and become independent painters; Pourbus' son Frans left for Antwerp in 1569 to make his fortune as a painter there, and Antonius Claeissens became the official city painter of Bruges in 1570. In addition, his style changed slightly during this period. His brushwork in these works and others of this period became less transparent and more enamel-like. This is seen in his portrait of Olivier Van Nieulant, which is now in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp. His change in style has been noted by scholars to lend a cooler appearance and a more classicist quality to his work, but also makes his subjects more rigid in appearance.
  This shift is also apparent in his history paintings, such as the Altarpiece of St. Hubert, painted around 1572.  Pourbus was greatly influenced by the artistic tradition of the Italian Renaissance, of which the Altarpiece is a prime example.  It is remarkable how well Pourbus is able to focus his compositions or inventions on the Italian Renaissance idiom, given that he has never been to Italy. Another example of this is the Saint-Hubert altarpiece, painted before 1572, which is praised as the best work of Pourbus by van Mander, who speaks of it as "a beautiful temple, with the perspective very well done".
  This painting, part of an altarpiece whose other shutters are lost, is also sometimes called "Baptism of Saint Eustace".  The legends of these two saints,  Saint Hubert (or Hubert de Liège) and  Saint Eustache (or Eustache de Rome) are indeed very close. A very detailed study on this painting and the questions it poses was published during the Gouda exhibition in 2018 by Josephina de Fouw.
  Usually, Pourbus drew his inspiration from artists of the Renaissance, such as Dürer, Raphael, and Titian. For example, he drew strongly on Titian for the middle panel of the Damhouder Triptych at the Church of Our Lady in Bruges.
  As a well-established painter, Pourbus was occasionally seen as too expensive during this period. For example, in autumn of 1571, he created a design for an altarpiece for the Church of Our Lady in Damme, but a different, cheaper painter, Jacob van den Coornhuuse, was commissioned to do the work instead. 
  Pourbus' studio continued to operate throughout the 1570s. Among others, he worked in close collaboration with Antonius Claeissens, who was influenced by Pourbus' style more than anyone else in Bruges in the early years of his career. The spectacular piece Lamentation, one of the highlights of the exhibition at Museum Gouda in 2018, was the result of an intensive collaboration between the two.
caption: The Lamentation of Christ, 215x166cm,  (n.d.), Schorr Collection, on long term loan to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv
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