Pieter Thijs

Pieter Thijs was born in a modest family as the son of the baker Pieter (Peter) Thijs en Anna Vasseur. Thijs had three masters. He trained with the obscure painter Artus Deurwerdeers as a cabinet painter, in the style practiced in the workshop of Frans Francken the Younger, the father-in-law of Deurwerdeers. It is only after moving to the workshop of Anthony van Dyck that Thijs learned portrait and history painting and started copying the great masters. He is considered to be van Dyck's last pupil. Family'' Everything suggests he completed his training with Gonzales Coques, a leading painter of portraits and history paintings who was known by the nickname 'de kleine van Dyck' ('the little van Dyck'). Thijs continued working in Coques' workshop for more than three years after becoming a master of the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke in 1644–45. Thanks to the presence of the collection of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, in Antwerp, Thijs was able to study the paintings of the Cinquecento. He collaborated on the decorations in Huis Honselaarsdijk, the palace of Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange near The Hague (now lost). Thijs married Constantia van der Beken on 19 March 1648. The couple had six daughters and four sons. His son Pieter Pauwel Thijs (1652–1679) followed in his footsteps as an artist but died young. After the death of his first wife he married Anna Bruydegom on 2 July 1670. Thijs played a major role in Antwerp's cultural life. He served as deacon and treasurer of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke and was the driving force behind the further development of the Chamber of rhetoric Violieren of the Guild. He was able to persuade the local playwright Willem Ogier to compose several works for the theater. Thijs trained his son Pieter Pauwel and was the teacher of Jan Fransicus Lauwereyssens. ==Work==

General Pieter Thijs produced allegorical and mythological compositions for the courts of the Southern Netherlands and the Dutch Republic as well as the local churches and monasteries. He was also in demand as a portrait painter by the court and the local bourgeoisie. The main distinguishing features between the styles of the two artists is that Willeboirts Bosschaerts' work uses a looser brushwork and displays a distinctive humanity and sensuality in the figures, especially the female figures. Thijs, on the other hand, applied the paint more tightly and thickly, and his figures express their emotions with more decorum and contained theatricality. His portraits followed the style of van Dyck in the eloquence of the hands and the meticulous execution of the reflections on the shimmering fabric. A representative portrait painting by Thijs is the Portrait of Philips van de Werve and His Wife (c. 1661, Auctioned at Sotheby's on 7 July 2005, London, lot 10). Its composition recalls van Dyck's large family-group portraits painted in his late English period, which Thijs would have seen when he was a pupil of van Dyck. The figures in the group portrait also closely adhere to the van Dyckian type, especially the two children. Pieter Boel probably also painted the still life and parrot in Thijs' Portrait of Philips van de Werve and His Wife. Thijs collaborated with flower painters on so-called 'garland paintings'. Garland paintings are a type of still life invented in Antwerp and whose earliest practitioner was Jan Brueghel the Elder. These paintings typically show a flower garland around a devotional image or portrait. Garland paintings were usually collaborations between a still life and a figure painter. An example is the composition Leopold of Austria in flower garland (Auctioned at Sotheby's, London on 5 December 2006, lot nr 412) in which the portrait of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria was painted by Thijs and the flower garland is by an unknown hand. In the 1650s, Pieter Thijs worked with Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert, Jan Brueghel the Younger and Adriaen van Utrecht on the cartoons for two series of tapestries for Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, with the titles Day and Night and The Months. The cartoons were painted after designs by Jan van den Hoecke and woven by the Brussels tapestry workshops. Some of the cartoons such as Diana, allegory of the night are in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. ==References==