Willen van Herp Circle

Circle of WILLEN VAN HERP (Antwerp, c. 1614 - 1677)
"Isaac and Jacob".
Oil on canvas.
It presents restorations on the pictorial surface.
It has a frame of the nineteenth century.
Measurements: 110 x 164 cm; 120 x 172 cm (frame).
This biblical passage is narrated in Genesis 27. In this passage, Isaac was already beginning to suffer the passage of time and, as a result, his eyesight began to fail him. On the other hand, together with his wife Rebecca, he had two sons: Esau, the elder, and Jacob, the younger. Isaac, seeing that death was stalking him, decided to bless Esau so that he could keep everything, but first he asked him to go hunting. Rebekah took advantage of this moment to weave her plan: with her mother's help, Jacob dressed in his brother's clothes, brought food to his father, and covered his arm with a sheepskin to imitate his brother's abundant hair. In this way he induced Isaac, old and blind, to mistake him for Esau. In the painting we see the climax of the story, including how Rebecca makes the gesture of silence to her son as long as everything goes as planned. As a good baroque work, it wants to play with the spectator, to make us part of the painting and turn us into accomplices of the crime.
Willen van Herp was a Flemish Baroque painter specialized in religious paintings and small cabinet paintings of genre scenes of the "life of the lower classes". He ran a large workshop and, thanks to his good connections with Antwerp art dealers, helped to spread the Flemish Baroque style internationally. For a long time it was believed that Willem van Herp had been a pupil of Peter Paul Rubens. Although he was not his pupil, he borrowed many motifs from Rubens and retouched copies after Rubens for the art dealer Matthijs Musson. It is not possible to discern an evolution in his style, since he only dated some of his paintings. His style is characterized by a somewhat mannered drawing and by the expressiveness of the figures. Many of his paintings can be considered copies or pastiches of original compositions by Antwerp painters such as Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Jacob Jordaens, Gerard Seghers, Jan Boeckhorst, Hendrick van Balen, Erasmus Quellinus the Younger, Gaspar de Crayer and Artus Wolffort, as well as Italian masters such as Raphael and Guido Ren.