page_title: Lucas van Valckenborch
section_title: Market scenes
hierarchical_section_title: Lucas van Valckenborch / Work / Market scenes
context_page_description: Lucas van Valckenborch or Lucas van Valckenborch the Elder was a Flemish painter, mainly known for his landscapes. He also made contributions to portrait painting, and allegorical and market scenes. Court painter to Archduke Matthias, the governor of the Spanish Netherlands in Brussels, he later migrated to Austria and then Germany where he joined members of his extended family of artists who had moved there for religious reasons.
context_section_description: Lucas van Valckenborch painted a number of market scenes, which are also distinctively tied to the four seasons. The Meat and Fish Market (Winter) (c. 1595, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) is an example of a market scene, which is also an allegory of winter.  The work was likely part of a series of four dedicated to the seasons. The imagery of the market scenes can be traced back to the previous generation of painters from the Antwerp school. In the series van Valckenborch particularly developed the tradition of art market scenes pioneered by Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer. He strived for a synthesis of still-life with landscape and genre painting.
  The still lifes in many of the market scenes were the work of his assistant Georg Flegel who may also have trained with him. A snow-covered fish market scene (Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp) is another example of a market scene set in the winter. People are shown skating on the ice in the background. Two muffled-up well-to-do women are making their purchases dressed in the typical Brabant style of around 1580–1600. The fishmonger is shown slicing off pieces of salmon, while his wife is taking smoked fish from a hook. The fish and utensils in the foreground are the work of Flegel who was able to render the fine metal shine of the brass bucket and the grain of the wooden water bucket. Georg Flegel also painted the food and luxurious tableware in two paintings of van Valckenborch depicting banquets (Silesian Museum and St Gilgen-Salzburg, H. Wiesenthal private collection).
caption: Feast
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image ExifOffset": "38", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1890", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1253"}