Abraham Godijn

Abraham Godijn or Abraham Godyn (alternative spellings of family name: Goddijn and Abraham Goddyn) (1655/56 – after 1724) was a Flemish painter who, after a stay in Italy, worked for a time as a court painter in Prague where he produced magnificent Baroque frescos. He later returned to Antwerp.

Life Details about his life are scarce. Abraham Godijn was probably born in 1655 or 1656 in Antwerp where he studied under the prominent history painter Hendrik Herregouts. He became in 1681 a member of the 'Sodaliteit van de Bejaerde Jongmans', a fraternity for bachelors established by the Jesuit order. Not long thereafter he travelled to Italy.

He moved on to Prague in 1690 where he worked as a court painter until 1698. He received a commission to paint frescos in the Troja Palace in Prague on which he worked with his brother Izaak. They were part of a group of artists who worked in 1687 for Wenzel Albert Duke of Sternberg on the decoration of the Troja Palace in Prague.

He is recorded back in Antwerp around 1711 where he became a member of the local Guild of Saint Luke in the same year. He was employed mainly on decorative commissions. He joined in 1716 the Antwerp Confrerie of Romanists when it was reconstituted on purely religious grounds. It was a condition of membership of the Confrerie that the member had visited Rome. He and Jan Pieter van Bredael the Younger were the last artists to become members of the Confrerie. In 1723 he became the dean of the Confrerie. The date and place of his death are not known. In the fresco programme Abraham Godijn achieved a sophisticated and complex synthesis of fictionalist painting of architecture and lively figural scenes.

He painted a series of the seven sacraments for the monastery of Saint Martin in Pontoise (now in Pontoise Cathedral).