Abraham Govaerts

Provenance :
• Robert Finck Gallery, Brussels;
• private collection.

[…] Pomona lived in the reign of king Procas over the Palatine hill. No other hamadryad, of the wood nymphs of Latium, tended the...

Provenance :
• Robert Finck Gallery, Brussels;
• private collection.

[…] Pomona lived in the reign of king Procas over the Palatine hill. No other hamadryad, of the wood nymphs of Latium, tended the gardens more skilfully or was more devoted to the orchards’ care, hence her name. She loved the fields and the branches loaded with ripe apples, not the woods and rivers. She carried a curved pruning knife, not a javelin, with which she cut back the luxuriant growth, and lopped the branches spreading out here and there, now splitting the bark and inserting a graft, providing sap from a different stock for the nursling. She would not allow them to suffer from being parched, watering, in trickling streams, the twining tendrils of thirsty root. This was her love, and her passion, and she had no longing for desire. Still fearing boorish aggression, she enclosed herself in an orchard, and denied an entrance, and shunned men.

What did the Satyrs, fitted by their youth for dancing, not do to possess her, and the Pans with pinewreathed horns, and Silvanus, always younger than his years, and the garden god who scares off thieves? But Vertumnus surpassed them all, even, in his love, though he was no more fortunate than them. O how often, disguised as an uncouth reaper, he would bring her a basket filled with ears of barley, and he was the perfect image of a reaper! Often he would display his forehead bound with freshly cut hay, and might seem to have been tossing the new-mown grass. Often he would be carrying an ox-goad in his stiff hand, so that you would swear he had just unyoked his weary team.

Given a knife he was a dresser and pruner of vines: he would carry a ladder: you would think he’d be picking apples. He was a soldier with a sword, or a fisherman taking up his rod. In short, by his many disguises, he frequently gained admittance, and found joy, gazing at her beauty. Once, he even covered his head with a coloured scarf, and leaning on a staff, with a wig of grey hair, imitated an old woman. He entered the well-tended garden, and admiring the fruit, said: ‘You are so much lovelier’, and gave her a few congratulatory kisses, as no true old woman would have done. He sat on the flattened grass, looking at the branches bending, weighed down with autumn fruit. There was a specimen elm opposite, covered with gleaming bunches of grapes. After he had praised it, and its companion vine, he said: ‘But if that tree stood there, unmated, without its vine, it would not be sought after for more than its leaves, and the vine also, which is joined to and rests on the elm, would lie on the ground, if it were not married to it, and leaning on it. [...]
                                                                  In Metamorphoses, Ovid, XIV, 608-697.


In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Flemish landscape painting underwent a significant evolution. The anecdotal scenes unfolding against the «heroic» landscapes of the «Velvet» Brueghel came to be replaced by strictly decorative landscapes. This new trend was spearheaded by Gillis van Coninxloo, who discovered an imaginative poetry in the luxuriant profusion of forests. Although he certainly drew upon van Coninxloo’s example, in the 1620s, Govaerts - this painting is dated 1620 - nevertheless affirmed a style of his own that could be viewed as increasingly Brueghelian in the finesse of the workmanship. Govaerts displays a technique as a colourist here on a par with that of Jan Brueghel the Elder, though it is distinguished by deeper tones that are denser in the foreground while the rest of the ground fades into a vaporous glow; and by the construction of the type of decorative composition of which he was fond.

The composition is organised around two sections which contrast on one hand through their motifs and colours and on the other hand, through the lighting which creates striking contrasts of shadow and light on the lush vegetation. This allows the artist to open the composition onto a clearing between two banks of forest, populated by nymphs and rendered in bluish-green hues similar to those used by Jan the Elder.

An interactive relationship can be observed between the two women, seated on the steps of a Roman pavilion whose door is open, as if to suggest metaphorically the epilogue to the tale. Vertumnus and Pomona are skilfully integrated into the scene that is enhanced by the symbols of the nymph and the god.

On the ground lie fruits and vegetables; in the right-hand foreground, carnations, narcissus, lilies and other flowers can be discerned. Within the context of this mythological ode to fertility, Govaerts plants numerous symbolic references to the implications of this myth. While the water-can bears a thinly veiled and evocative shape, the squirrel alongside it is also a symbol of fertility. The watching monkey, an animal counterpart to mankind, prepares to bite into the forbidden fruit just as Pomona lends and attentive ear to the kind voice of a disguised Vertumnus.

In this depiction, in which all of the elements work in concert to amplify and render explicit the theme, aside from the originality of the subject in the work of Govaerts, it is certainly the masterly treatment of the detail that reveals the intrinsic quality of this copper panel. The flowers and fruits, in the minute grace of their rendering, are worthy of the «Velvet» Brueghel, while Govaerts’ lyricism makes the work all the more powerful.

1589 - Antwerp - 1626


The Flemish landscape painter Abraham Govaerts belongs to the generation of painters influenced by Jan Brueghel (ca. 1569-1642), known as the “Velvet” Brueghel, whose pupil or...