Simon de Vos

(Antwerp 1603–1676)
The Earthly Paradise with the Fall of Adam and Eve,
oil on canvas, 117 x 169 cm, framed

Provenance:
commissioned from the artist between 1635 and 1644 for the decoration of the Cathedral of Seville;
sale, Bukowskis, Stockholm, 26 September 1934, lot 324;
Folkner Collection, Belgium (1982);
Private collection, Belgium

Literature:
Societé royale de Zoologie d‘Anvers, Het Aards Paradijs: Dierenvorstellingen in de Nederlanden van de 16de en 17de Eeuw,
in: Samenwerking met Standaard Uitg., Antwerp 1982, cat. no. 35,
pp. 101/102

We are grateful to Hans Vlieghe for confirming the attribution to Simon de Vos.

During the seventeenth century Spain was an extremely important market for the painters of Antwerp. Many of the Flemish paintings for the Spanish court arrived via the intermediation of the governors of the Spanish Netherlands or through diplomats.

The decoration of the cathedral of Seville with a Genesis cycle was an important commission and possibly for Simon de Vos the most significant one (see Matías Días Padron, Simon de Vos en la cathedral de Sevilla, Archivio Espanol de Arte, vol. 48, no. 192, Madrid 1975, pp. 397–401). Six of a series of twelve paintings are conserved in the chapel of Saint Antony in the cathedral of Sevilla: The Creation of Heaven and Earth, The Creation of Light, The Separation of Earth and Waters, The Creation of the Animals, The Creation of Adam and Cain Slaying Abel. All of these paintings are oil on canvas and measure about 114 x 168 cm (see Het Aards Paradijs, op. cit., p. 102). Some are dated 1644 and the Cain painting still bears its number ‘12’ which makes it plausible that Seville originally had a series of twelve paintings as a Genesis cycle. According to the exhibition catalogue in 1982, all of the missing six paintings from that series can be traced: The Creation of Eve is in a private collection in Madrid, whilst the Labours of Adam and Eve was sold at Christie’s in 1982, as lot 26, signed and dated 1635. The present painting was sold together with three others: Expulsion, God Telling Adam and Eve of the Forbidden Fruit and God Punishes Adam and Eve, in 1943 at Bukowskis in Stockholm.

Simon de Vos worked in the studio of Peter Paul Rubens and it is likely that he travelled abroad. A stay in Rome is suggested by his early works, which show a similarity with the ‘low-life’ genre paintings of the Bamboccianti. De Vos must have returned to his hometown in 1626 as in that year he married Catharina van Utrecht, a sister of the Antwerp still life painter Adriaen van Utrecht. He worked in Antwerp for most of his life and is known to have supplied works for the Antwerp art dealers Forchondt and Chrysostoom van Immerseel. He enjoyed the respect of his peers as is shown by the fact that when Rubens died his estate included one of de Vos’s pictures. When his wife died in 1670 he possessed four properties in Antwerp and owned a collection of 290 paintings, so he was financially successful.

De Vos’s first works were cabinet paintings of genre scenes, including various merry companies and group portraits. These make use of a mannerist pyramidal composition. An example of a painting from this period is the Gathering of Smokers and Drinkers in the Louvre, Paris (1626). His works from the late 1620s until circa 1640, which were made after his return to Antwerp, are mostly small ‘merry company’ and courtly genre scenes, reminiscent of contemporary Dutch painters such as Dirck Hals and Pieter Codde. After 1640 de Vos turned almost entirely away from genre scenes and painted mostly religious and allegorical scenes and history subjects, influenced stylistically at first by Rubens and then increasingly by Anthony van Dyck. Examples include the Martyrdom of Saint Philip (circa 1645/48) in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. These later works were generally larger in format but used the compositional formulae of the cabinet paintings. During this period he also created the Genesis cycle for Seville, including the present painting.