Gaspard de Crayer

Gaspard de Crayer was one of the leading painters of religious pictures in seventeenth century Flanders. After his early work he came under the influence of Rubens, and his altarpieces have Rubens’s warm colour, full figures and grand, balanced compositions, with a calmer and more devotional tone.

He was born in Antwerp in 1584 and ran a large workshop in Brussels for about fifty years, producing altarpieces for churches across Flanders, Germany and Spain. He was court painter to the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, and later to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm. His equestrian portrait of Don Diego Messia is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. In his last years he moved to Ghent, where he died in 1669.

His portrait of The Cardinal Infante and Alexander and Diogenes show his two sides, official portraitist and history painter.