Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen

Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen

Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen (also Cornelius Jonson van Ceulen, Cornelius Johnson, Cornelis Jansz. van Ceulen and many other variants)^[1] (bapt. October 14, 1593, London – bur. August 5, 1661, Utrecht) was an English painter of portraits of Dutch or Flemish parentage. He has been described as "one of the most gifted and prolific portrait painters practising in England during the 1620s and 1630s".^[2]

Family life

Janssens van Ceulen was born to Dutch or Flemish parents in London - his father had been a refugee from Antwerp, and the family had originated in Cologne.^[3] He was baptised at the Dutch church at Austin Friars, the son of Johanna le Grand and Cornelius Johnson. He may have been trained in the Netherlands, and was certainly influenced by other artists from the Netherlands,^[4] but he was active in England, at least from 1618 to 1643. In the 1620s, he lived and had his studio in Blackfriars, London, as did Anthony van Dyck; it was just outside the boundaries of the City of London, and so avoided the monopoly in the City of members of the London painters' Guild. He married Elizabeth Beke of Colchester in 1622. Janssens' son (Cornelius Janssens, junior) was born in 1634. He was also a painter. Janssens' daughter was married to Nicholas Russell of Bruges. Janssens moved to Canterbury in the mid 1630s, living with Sir Arnold Braems, a Flemish merchant. Janssens continued to live in England until after the outbreak of the English Civil War, but in October 1643, apparently at the insistence of his wife, he moved to Middelburg, and between 1646 and 1652 he lived in Amsterdam, before settling in Utrecht, where he was buried.^[5]

Portraiture

A typical early work of 1626, Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, also later a prominent Royalist.

Janssens' first dated work is 1617, and may be of a Dutch subject; 1619 marks the beginning of his English portraits, which were initially heads only.^[6] He was one of the few artists in England at this time who consistently signed and dated their work, except for his later full-lengths, which his clients may have hoped would be mistaken for more expensive Van Dycks. He may have been successful in this, as some full-length portraits attributed to van Dyck's workshop may well be by him.^[6] His first identified three-quarter length is dated 1623, and shows a certain lack of skill in dealing with the body, which is overcome in later works.^[7] In the early years, his standard way of signing portraits was the phrase “fecit C J”. For painting a portrait, Janssens charged £5.^[8] His early portraits were panel paintings with "fictive" oval frames - they appear to have a wooden or marble oval surround, but this is actually painted on to the panel. This “trompe l’oeil” effect was one of Janssens’ favourite devices in the early part of his career. He also painted some portrait miniatures on copper.

He painted many portraits of emerging new gentry, including Lady Rose MacDonnell of Antrim. One of his earliest surviving portraits is of Susanna Temple, grandmother of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (Tate). This portrait was subsequently engraved by Robert White towards the end of the seventeenth century. A copy of the engraving was among the prints owned by Samuel Pepys which subsequently passed to Magdalene College, Cambridge.^[9] In 1632, Janssens was appointed as a “his Majesty's servant in the quality of Picture drawer” by Charles I, perhaps in connection with the arrival of Van Dyck and the departure from England of Daniel Mytens - Janssens may have been found a role as a back-up for van Dyck.^[6] His royal portraits include Charles I as well as Charles II and James II, painted as children, both of which are in the National Portrait Gallery (London). He collaborated with Gerard Houckgeest on a portrait of Charles I's wife, Queen Henrietta Maria.^[10]

Baron Capel and his Family, 1641. Capel was a leading Royalist, executed in 1649.

His style varies considerably over his career, and he was able to assimilate new influences into his own style without any discordant effect. He took from, in turn, Mytens, van Dyck, and William Dobson, and his last Dutch portraits show a different style reflecting contemporary portraiture there.^[5]

Name

There is some controversy over his name. Finberg says "I think I may take this opportunity to protest once again against the prevalent habit of calling this artist Janssens. In spite of Walpole's unfortunate remark that this is the correct form of the name, there is no excuse for using it. While in England the artist invariably spelt his name Cornelius Johnson, and when he left England he changed the form to Jonson. The usual form of his signature when the name is given in full is invariably, in all the pictures painted after 1643 which I have seen : ' Cornelius Jonson van Ceulen.' He appears never to have adopted the form of Janson, Jansen, or Janssens. But so long as auctioneers are born with an ingrained conviction that a foreign-looking name gives greater value to a picture than an English name, so long may we expect to find Cornelius Johnson or Jonson masquerading in catalogues as Cornelius Janssens."^[11]

Notes

1. ^ The Getty Union List of Artist's Names lists over 50 variants, an exceptional number even for this period.
2. ^ Weiss Gallery
3. ^ Waterhouse, 60
4. ^ Karen Hearn, Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530-1630. (New York: Rizzoli, 1995. ISBN 0-8478-1940-X)
5. ^ ^{a b} Waterhouse, 61-2
6. ^ ^{a b c} Waterhouse, 62
7. ^ Waterhouse, 61
8. ^ literally "five broad pieces of gold" – a broad piece was a hammered piece of gold worth twenty shillings (£1). Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of painters in England
9. ^ Eric Chamberlain, Catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge
10. ^ Karen Hearn, ‘Johnson, Cornelius (bap. 1593, d. 1661)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 3 Dec 2008
11. ^ Alexander J Finberg, A CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF PORTRAITS BY CORNELIUS JOHNSON, OR JONSON (Walpole Society, Volume 10, 1922)

References

• Ellis Waterhouse, "Painting in Britain, 1530-1790", 4th Edn, 1978, Penguin Books (now Yale History of Art series)
• Artist record for Cornelis Jonson van Ceulen (I)] in the RKD

Persondata
Name	Janssens Van Ceulen, Cornelis
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	October 14, 1593
Place of birth
Date of death	August 5, 1661
Place of death