Gillis van Coninxloo

Portrait of Gillis van Coninxloo by Andries Jacobsz Stock, published in 1610 by Hendrik Hondius I.

Elijah is fed by the crows, late 16th century.

Gillis van Coninxloo (1544 – 1607) was a Dutch painter of forest landscapes, the most famous member of a large family of artists. He travelled through France, and lived in Germany for several years to avoid religious persecution.

He was born at Antwerp and studied under Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Lenaert Kroes and Gillis Mostaert. He practiced his art in France, but in 1587, on account of religious persecution, emigrated to Frankenthal and passed his later life in Amsterdam, where he died in 1607.

Coninxloo ranks as one of the most important Dutch landscape painters of the transition from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. He exercised a strong influence on Jan Brueghel the Elder, Schoubroeck, Savery, and other Flemish and Dutch landscape painters of the transition period. Coninxloo is considered the founder of a new approach to the painting of forests; while earlier forest landscapes had used woods as backdrops for human activity, van Coninxloo made them a subject, submerging tiny human figures in elaborate compositions of trees in hugely exaggerated scale.

During his stay at Frankenthal from 1588 to 1595, he influenced several better known Dutch landscape-painters collectively referred to as the Frankenthal School. Karel van Mander wrote about him and his father Jan den Hollander in his Schilder-boeck. He wrote that his teacher Pieter Coeke van Aelst was his cousin, and that his landscapes were among the best of all Dutch landscape artists.

Works

His development is clearly observable in his paintings. Examples are in Liechtenstein Gallery, Vienna, Stuttgart, Strassburg, Graz, Saarbrücken etc. Some other paintings of his are:

• "The Judgment of Midas" (Dresden)
• "Latona" (Hermitage, St. Petersburg)
• "Landscape with Venus and Adonis" (Frankenthal)
• "Landscape with Duckhunters" (Saarland Museum, Saarbrücken)

External links

• Web Gallery of Art: Biography of Gillis van Coninxloo
• Web Gallery of Art: Paintings by Gillis van Coninxloo