Pan And Syrinx - Jan Brueghel The Younger Workshop

Oil on copper. Flanders, mid-17th century, workshop of Jan Brueghel the Younger.
In a lush lake landscape with bluish reflections, a faun pursues a young lady with her clothes undone. This lustful creature, straight out of Ovid's Metamorphoses, is none other than the Greek god Pan, son of Hermes and a nymph. This half-man, half-goat wriggles at the idea of capturing the nymph Syrinx. While trying to escape him, the latter finds herself stopped by the Ladon River. As the beast gains ground, the nymph's fate seems sealed. She then begs her sisters to turn her into a reed – which they do. Thus the artist represents Pan in the process of embracing reeds, materializing the subtraction of his prey, like this water fowl that we see flying towards the outer edges of the composition. The next moment, while sighing in pain near the reeds, the faun will produce a sweet melody which will give him the idea of assembling them to make a flute allowing him to converse with Syrinx. Of this double metamorphosis of the nymph into a reed, then of the reeds into a flute, the artist represents the first part. In doing so, he composes a brilliant allegory of envy and frustration that Pan will then manage to transcend into music.
Conceived as a compilation of legends narrating the metamorphoses of gods and mortals, Ovid's poems delighted the elite of the Grande Siècle who drew inspiration from them for their lyrical works. From then on, many artists seized on the figure of the satyr, which offered them a license to represent erotic and subversive situations. Thus, Pierre Paul Rubens, in collaboration with Jan Brueghel the father then his son, represented several times the legend of Pan and Syrinx; the first being in charge of the figures while the second treated the landscape. Our painting is a workshop replica of a version that Rubens executed with Jan Brueghel II around 1626-28 kept in the Schwerin museum. The more regular style of drawing in our composition and the touch of the figures indicate work from Brueghel's studio rather than one in which Rubens would have directly collaborated. It is a typical example of the production of this workshop which specialized in replicas and variants of the same subject. It is hardly surprising to see the Brueghel workshop repeating this subject whose popularity is attested in Cabinet de collectionneur with an allegory of painting in which Cornelis de Baellieur represents the Pan and Syrinx of Jan Brueghel II hanging on the wall. Nevertheless, our painting differs from this version of 1626-28 by deploying an excess of bluish nuances in the greens of the landscape, thus reinforcing the marshy aspect of the decor and conferring a dreamlike atmosphere on the whole.

We have chosen to present this precious cabinet painting in a Dutch ebonized reverse profile wood frame.
Dimensions: 19.5 x 28.5 cm - 46.5 x 50.5 cm with the frame

Jan Brueghel II or the Younger (Antwerp 13 sept. 1601 – id. 01 sept. 1678) is a Flemish painter who begins his apprenticeship with his father, Jan Brueghel the Elder (known as Brueghel de Velours), before making the trip to Italy accompanied by his childhood friend, Anthony van Dyck. Faced with the sudden death of his father in 1624, he returned to Antwerp where he took over the reins of the family workshop and was appointed master of the guild of Saint Luke. Completing his father's current orders, he specializes like him in landscape painting, which gives him the opportunity to collaborate with Pierre Paul Rubens. No less appreciated than his father, Jan Brueghel II painted for the courts of Austria and France in the 1650s.

Bibliography:
BONNEFOY, Yves, Dictionary of mythologies and religions of traditional societies and the ancient world, Paris, Flammarion, 1981.
LAVOCAT, Françoise, The Syrinx at the stake: Pan and the satyrs in the Renaissance and the Baroque age, Geneva, Droz, 2005.
MULDERS van, Christine, Corpus Rubenanium Ludwig Burchard Part XXVII: Works Collaboration with Jan Brueghel I & II, Brepols, 2016.
THIERY, Yvonne, Flemish landscape painters in the 17th century: precursors to Rubens, Brussels, Lefèbvre and Gillet, 1988.