Antoon Sallaert

Antoon Sallaert or Anthonis Sallaert (1594–1650) was a Flemish Baroque painter, draughtsman and printmaker who was active in Brussels. Sallaert produced many devotional paintings for the Brussels court of Archdukes Albert and Isabella as well as for the local churches. Sallaert was an innovative printmaker and is credited with the invention of the monotype technique. He was an important tapestry designer for the local weaving workshops.

Life Antoon Sallaert was a pupil of the Brussels painter Michel de Bordeaux starting from 1606. Some sources mention that Sallaert was a pupil of Peter Paul Rubens or worked in the workshop of Rubens. There does not appear to be evidence for this, although some of his works are close in style to Rubens.

Work

General

Sallaert was a versatile artist who worked in various genres and media. He painted religious as well a mythological subjects and was also a portrait painter. He was a regular contributor of designs for local publications and produced many monotypes. He further designed cartoons for the local weaving workshops. His later works became more dramatic and his style had an almost calligraphic and mannered quality. Despite a certain dependence on Rubens, his oil sketches have a very personal approach and style. The use of a reddish-brown background tone was characteristic of his oil sketches.

Sallaert painted multiple portraits which were compared to those of Anthony van Dyck. He began to make monotypes in the mid-1640s, normally working from black to white, and produced over twenty surviving ones, over half of which are set at night. It is believed that Sallaert created his first monotypes in the early 1640s and is therefore to be regarded as the inventor of this printing process. Both artists used the new technique in different ways. Castiglione created most of his monotypes as black-field images by wiping away ink on a prepared plate thus producing white and grey lines. Sallaert, on the other hand, brushed bold, tapering lines onto the printing surface with meticulous precision. It is likely that Sallaert's monotype style was influenced by the chiaroscuro woodcuts of the Dutch engraver Hendrik Goltzius. Sallaert found in the monotype a technique which was the closest to drawing and oil sketching. His monotypes and drawings are characterised by swelling lines and tapering ends. He often added by hand white highlights to his monotypes. There is a clear economy of line in his drawings and monotypes when compared to his woodcuts and etchings. Sallaert clearly appreciated in the monotype technique the freedom to design on a plate before printing it on paper.

Tapestry designs

Antoon Sallaert was a prominent designer of tapestries. Some of the tapestry series he worked on were The sufferings of Cupid, The life of Man and the Sapientia or the Powers that rule the World, which had a moralising intent. The cartoons for the Cupid series can be dated approximately between 1628 and 1639. The series of seven tapestries of the Life of Man were a reflection on the ages of man and were inspired by Otto van Veen's 1607 Emblemata Horatiana. King Philip II of Spain acquired in 1636 a set of tapestries of the Life of Man and the Life of Theseus after designs by Sallaert.

In 1646 Sallaert was granted tax relief by the Brussels city government in recognition of his contribution to the tapestry industry. Sallaert had stressed in his application for tax relief the fact that his introduction of a new style in Brussels tapestry design made it unnecessary for the local workshops to hire non-local artists. This clearly showed a protectionist reflex to Jordaens' involvement in the Brussels tapestry industry. In 1645, only a few months before Sallaert filed his tax relief application, the Brussels tapestry maker Boudewijn van Beveren had hung a cartoon of Jordaens' Proverbs in the church of St Catherine. This had likely bruised Sallaert's ego. Sallaert's tapestry designs included adaptations of 16th-century cartoons. Like other contemporary tapestry designers, Sallaert developed a mixture of traditional 16th-century and new 17th-century styles thus blending one-dimensional monumentality and three-dimensional depth.