Dan Ewing’s Jan de Beer is a shining example of what can be achieved by nurturing a project over the course of a career. Ewing’s book is distinguished by the extensive research, breadth of knowledge, and depth of thinking that come only with time. This profusely illustrated and felicitously written volume begins with an introduction that considers De Beer’s reputation. The first chapter then presents a fresh evaluation of the Antwerp mannerist style. The second examines a drawing in London, which serves as the basis for other attributions to De Beer. The third analyzes the artist’s drawings, while the penultimate chapter investigates his paintings. Ewing’s conclusions precede appendixes of documents and literary sources that mention De Beer, named panel painters who were active in Antwerp from 1500 to 1540, and extant contemporary Antwerp paintings and sculpted altarpieces. Catalogues of De Beer’s oeuvre and drawings produced in his circle conclude the volume.
Ewing demonstrates that documents repeatedly make clear that De Beer was highly esteemed in his lifetime and beyond. In 1527–28 Lodovico Guicciardini singled out the master as one of the top four painters in Antwerp, and contemporary documents reveal his many commissions, guild positions, and students. But soon De Beer fell into oblivion, where he remained until 1902 when Georges Hulin de Loo linked an inscription on the London drawing to De Beer’s name. James Weale published this discovery in 1908, and soon Max J. Friedländer became the first to attribute a body of works to De Beer. Friedländer’s condemnation of the painter’s work, however, contributed to his subsequent neglect.
Chapter 1 places De Beer in the context of the major mercantile city of Antwerp, home to 180 master painters in 1528. Ewing makes clear that although art historians favor painters who point to the future or produce original works, early sixteenth-century Antwerp preferred Gothic art, serial painting, and mass production, features that defined Antwerp mannerism. Furthermore, Ewing notes that contemporary sources contradict much current art historical thinking by terming Gothic works “moderne” and Italianate ones “antiek” (29). As Ewing demonstrates, the flamboyant Gothic of the sixteenth century threw off the restraint of an earlier century to embrace “exaggerated curves and whorls,” artificial and inventive embellishments, extravagant costumes, “rhythms and torsions of bodily motions,” “exquisite color combinations,” and “marvelous excesses” of all kinds (36–38). Ewing justly compares this complicated and exuberant style to contemporary architecture, music, calligraphy, and literature, especially the stilus ornatus of Antwerp rhetoricians.
Chapter 2 explores De Beer’s career, based on archives and neighborhood maps, which facilitate an understanding of the painter’s social networks. Ewing examines De Beer’s commissions, associates, relatives, and students, some of whom came to him for advanced training or from outside Antwerp. Chapter 3 focuses on the sketch in London that has been attributed to De Beer and may have been originally designed for internal shop use and only later signed, dated, and inscribed as a gift for the painter Joachim Patinir. Ewing employs this drawing of heads, which shows De Beer’s versatility, as a basis for attributing other works to the painter. De Beer produced more sketches than any other contemporary Antwerp artist, and Ewing’s fourth chapter investigates the artist’s ethereal drawings, which comprise one-third of his surviving production. This chapter on De Beer’s drawings, which served as window designs or shop models, show Ewing’s connoisseurship at its best.
Chapter 5, the heart of the book, explores De Beer’s paintings. At times I questioned Ewing’s embrace of symbolism, such as the cat as a “symbol of the Virgin” (144) or the dog as a reference to marital fidelity (144), but Ewing is a brilliant connoisseur who describes De Beer’s virtuosic style, with its “distinctive system of light spotting” (147), “energy and verve” (154), inventive iconography, “obsessive attention to minute details” (176), and “exacting alignment” of forms with intersecting floor tiles (189). While scrupulously acknowledging the contributions of earlier scholars, Ewing produces a page turner, building layer upon layer, as he pushes his evidence to the limit and carefully, logically, builds his arguments. His book is certain to become the standard monograph on Jan de Beer.
