The Rape of Europa - a sketch

This small panel is a fascinating early work by the great Antwerp master Jacob Jordaens, painted at a moment when the young artist was announcing his arrival to the flourishing art world of his native city. Displaying close parallels with Jordaens' Abduction of Europa of circa 1615 (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie; fig. 1), it was probably painted by the artist when he was still in his early twenties as a modello for a now lost work or one that was never executed.

Unlike many young painters in Antwerp during the early years of the seventeenth century, Jordaens was not trained in the studio of the city’s leading painter Peter Paul Rubens, but rather in that of Rubens’ own teacher, Adam van Noort, who would later become his father-in-law. Early records suggest that Jordaens’ earliest independent paintings were made in tempera and watercolour (though none now survive), since in 1615, when he entered the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke, he was registered as a ‘waterschilder’ (‘waterpainter’; d’Hulst, op. cit., p. 23). He soon, however, proved himself adept at working with oils. Painted with quick, assured brushstrokes and animated by dynamic action and effects of light, the present painting, likely designed as a sketch for a larger picture, shows the vibrancy and vitality of the artist’s early works in Antwerp and his precocious talent.

Jordaens’ subject is a familiar one, showing the culminative moment in the abduction of the Phoenician princess, Europa, by Jupiter. Overcome by lust for the princess, the god ‘laid aside his glorious dignity [and]…assumed the semblance of a bull…his colour white as virgin snow untrod’. The beauty of the beast attracted Europa as it frolicked on the seashore. Seeing the bull, the princess approached, garlanding him with flowers and eventually mounting upon his back whereupon, ‘not a moment resting [Zeus] bore her thence, across the surface of the Middle Sea, while she affrighted gazed upon the shore – so fast receding’ (Ovid, Metamorphoses, B. More (trans.), W. Brwere (ed.), Boston, 1922 (revised 1978), Book II, 853-6; 886-9). The scene includes no hint of the shores from which the princess has been carried, showing Europa seated on the back of the god, still in the guise of a bull, while tritons and nereids emerge from the waves around her and putti descend in a tumbling group from the sky above.

The composition is divided between the abduction and the triumphant figure of Neptune, who occupies the right-hand side of the panel. The artist evidently took particular interest in the subject of Europa’s abduction, one which had enjoyed a popularity amongst painters from the early sixteenth century. Shortly after he painted the present panel, Jordaens embarked on a much larger canvas, depicting the moment just before Jupiter plunged into the sea carrying Europa on his back. This Rape of Europa, now in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, nonetheless shows a similar treatment of flesh tones, dramatic effects of light and swirling drapery to the present small work. The seated figure of Europa herself is likewise very similar to the present picture. Some years later, Jordaens returned once again to the same subject, painting a more idyllic canvas that shows Europa and her companions surrounded by cattle, as the princess lowers herself onto the back of the demurely reclining bull (1643; Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts).

The composition here is also known from a panel painted by Jordaens in around 1615, now in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig. Throughout the present picture, areas of the careful scheme of underdrawing remain visible through the paint layers. Infrared reflectography, moreover, reveals the extent of this graphic system. Sketched in black chalk, the underdrawing of the panel is careful and precise, setting out a comprehensive scheme with very minor alterations in the paint layers above. Given its similarly to the design of the Braunschweig painting, Jordaens may have either taken that painting as his prototype, or referred to a shared preliminary drawing to work up the present picture, following a pattern of the Rape of Europa that he had already established. While aspects of the present panel are painted relatively thinly and schematically in ‘dead colouring’ (painted only with the preliminary layers of paint), other areas are more precisely rendered and finished. The body of Europa, for example, is carefully depicted, with attention given to the rounded curves of her body and carefully placed white highlights, serving to add three-dimensionality to the figure. Similarly, the figure of Neptune is fully resolved, with rapid impasto strokes of the brush giving character to his face. Attention is also paid to more minute details, like Neptune's feet reflected in the gleaming shell of the chariot in which he stands triumphant, and the small drops of water running across the legs of the nereids gathered to the right of the panel, exhibiting a thorough technical mastery and a vigorous power of expression.