Jan de Herdt

Jan de Herdt, in Italy also called Il fiammingo (Antwerp, c. 1620 – between 1686 and 1690) was a Flemish painter and draughtsman. After training in Antwerp, he spent his entire career abroad, first in Northern Italy and later in Vienna and other cities in central Europe. He was mainly a portrait artist but also painted genre scenes as well as religious, mythological and allegorical subjects. He was part of a network of Flemish and Dutch painters working for the court, aristocracy and ecclesiastical institutions of central Europe.

Life Details about the life of Jan de Herdt are sketchy. He is believed to have been born in Antwerp around 1620. It is not clear who was his master.

He left Flanders and was subsequently recorded in Northern Italy, where he was documented in Lovere in 1657 as working on an altarpiece for the local church of St George. The large painting depicting Moses striking the rock is still in situ. He was recorded in Bergamo in 1658 where he painted the Abraham and Abimelech for the Santa Maria Maggiore Church, which is still in situ.

Jan de Herdt followed in the footsteps of many of his compatriots of the previous generation who sought a career in Central Europe. The Southern Netherlands had developed a close bond with the Imperial court in Vienna as its Spanish Habsburg rulers were connected with it through dynastic links. The governors of the Southern Netherlands were often members of the Austrian Imperial family. They occasionally took artists from the Southern Netherlands with them when they returned to Vienna after being called back from their post. This was the case with Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, who brought artists such as Jan Anton van der Baren, Franciscus van der Steen and Nikolaus van Hoy with him to Vienna.

Jan de Herdt's brother had preceded him as he was working in Vienna as a goldsmith to the court and may have been instrumental in introducing Jan to the court in Vienna. While he is believed to have arrived in Vienna around 1660, Jan is first documented in Vienna on 8 January 1662. On that date he signed his name in the ecclesiastical registers of the Schottenkirche (Scottish church) in Vienna as he together with the Flemish engraver Franciscus van der Steen acted as a witnesses at the wedding of the Dutch artist Hans de Jode. Jan de Herdt later collaborated with van der Steen on a series of aristocratic portraits for the publication Historia di Lepoldo Cesare. In Vienna, de Herdt painted portraits of courtiers as well as history paintings for their chateaux and palaces.

Jan de Herdt also was aware of trends in Central European painting. This is shown in his Portrait of the family of Imperial Goldsmith Franz Wilhelm de Harde von Antorff (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium). De Herdt's family portrait likely includes a self-portrait in the young man on the left who holds a watch in his left hand and points with his right hand to the floor. Alternatively, this may be a portrait of his nephew. Given the similarities between the two works, de Herdt's family portrait may indicate that he had seen the Family of precious stone cutter Dionysius Miseroni (National Gallery Prague) painted by the Czech portrait painter Karel Škréta in 1653. This was one of the first group portraits of this kind in Central Europe. In 1669 Tobias Pock painted a Self-Portrait with the artist's family in which he depicted himself in a manner that is almost identical to the one used by Jan de Herdt in his family portrait. Pock may have known de Herdt's family portrait. Jan de Herdt along with the above-mentioned artists created an entirely new visual language in Central Europe through this type of communicative group portrait. Jan de Herdt contributed at least six designs for portraits: Jerzy Sebastian Lubomirski, Duke Ferdinand Dietrichstein, Count Jean-Louis Raduit de Souches, Count Raimund Montecuccoli, Count Jan Rottal and Count Nicholas Zrinsky. The prints designed by de Herdt in this publication have been used as the basis for attributing paintings to de Herdt. Another painting by de Herdt in Lombardy is an altarpiece of Moses striking the rock preserved in the Church of Saint Georges in Lovere. This work is remarkable for its large size (785 cm high and 500 cm wide) and the movement of the large crowd depicted in it.