page_title: Tomás Yepes
section_title: Themes
hierarchical_section_title: Tomás Yepes / Themes
caption_attribution_description: Spanish: Bodegón con escritorio de ébano y floreros
context_page_description: Tomás de Yepes or Hiepes was a Spanish painter in the Kingdom of Valencia. Considered as an important artist of the Baroque style, he worked as a painter of bodegón and still life. Although he is noted to be active since the second decade of the 17th century, earliest works attributed to him come from the 1640s.
  Yepes' depictions of vases, flowers, fruits, and everyday objects were prominent in the region during the 17th and 18th century, and he has been regarded as one of the major rediscoveries of art history. His works are exhibited in museums and in private collections worldwide, with the Prado Museum, Madrid host to the most extensive collection of his paintings.
context_section_description: Yepes specialised in painting bodegón and still life. His usage of contrast, detail, and deep colour belong to the Baroque style of paintings. He is noted for frequently painting vases, flowers, fruits, and everyday objects on tables and against landscapes. Most of his paintings had underlying common themes: flowers in dark vases, fruits in porcelain bowls, and plain tablecloth occasionally with laces. His works have been described as old-fashioned relative to contemporary artists in Madrid of that time. He employed symmetrical designs without much disruption in his patterns, and his dim lighting and range of colours have been compared with that of the Spanish painter Jerónimo Jacinto de Espinosa.
  He had studied works of the Spanish painter Juan van der Hamen and some of his early paintings were similar to Hamen's style. Both employed symmetry of compositions, dark lighting, and highlighted the quality of objects by underlining their contours and applying multiple glazes. His paintings of sweets and desserts, such as Bodegón con dulces y frutos secos (Still-life with Sweets and Dried Fruit, 1650), draw a lot of parallels to Hamen's works with themes of lateral illumination, strong shadows, and symmetry.  His later works differed from Hamen's in that he introduced more variety of motifs, such as Manises ceramics in flower pots, Delft porcelain vases, rich branchy rugs, and landscapes.
  He also painted in vanitas genre; in Vanitas, he arranged a skull and a femur with a book, an hourglass, a bouquet of flowers and a crucifix, on a plinth with the inscription Et sicut in Adam omnes moriuntur ita et in Christo omnes vivificabuntur ("For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive", I Corinthians 15:22). Virgen de los desamparados (Virgin of the Forsaken, 1644), a religious work by Yepes is a trompe-l'œil of the venerated image on an altar between two candelabra which is covered with jewels, reliquaries, rosaries, and painted miniatures.
  Yepes painted animal and human figures against landscapes, as can be seen in Rincón de jardín con perrito (Garden Corner with a Dog, 1660s) for the former, and Cazador bebiendo en un arroyo (Hunter Drinking in a Stream, 1650) and Cazador dormido en un paisaje (Hunter Asleep in a Landscape, 1650) for the latter. Influences of Flemish painting can be observed in some of his works, such as Cuatro macetas de flores en un jardín (Four Pots of Flowers in a Garden, 1663-64) which he painted in a more naturalistic and less ornamental manner. He made use of Flemish engravings of the German engraver Jacob Binck in Bodegón con escritorio de ébano y floreros (Still Life with Ebony Desk and Vases, 1654) to depict Minerva.
caption: Bodegón con escritorio de ébano y floreros (Still Life with Ebony Desk and Vases, 1654), with a depiction of Minerva.
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