Frans Francken the Younger (1581 – 6 May 1642), was a Flemish Baroque painter and the best-known member of the large Francken

Francken

In the Francken family of Antwerp in the 16th and 17th centuries were 11 painters. Many bore the same Christian name in succession. Hence there is confusion in the classification of paintings not differing widely in style or execution...

 family of artists.

Francken was born in Antwerp. Many of his works are small historical, allegorical and biblical cabinet painting

Cabinet painting

A cabinet painting is a small painting, typically no larger than about two feet in either dimension, but often much smaller. The term is especially used of paintings that show full-length figures at a small scale, as opposed to say a head painted nearly life-size, and that are painted very...

s with the focus on figures. He also invented or popularized several new themes that became popular in Flemish painting, such as genre scenes

Genre painting

Genre works, also called genre scenes or genre views, are pictorial representations in any of various media that represent scenes or events from everyday life, such as markets, domestic settings, interiors, parties, inn scenes, and street scenes. Such representations may be realistic, imagined, or...

 populated by monkeys (later imitated by David Teniers the Younger

David Teniers the Younger

David Teniers the Younger was a Flemish artist born in Antwerp, the son of David Teniers the Elder. His son David Teniers III and his grandson David Teniers IV were also painters...

) and Kunstkamer paintings displaying a wealth of natural and artistic treasures against a neutral wall. Francken frequently collaborated with other artists, adding figures to works by Tobias Verhaecht

Tobias Verhaecht

Tobias Verhaecht was a painter and draughtsman active in Antwerp, Florence and Rome. Primarily a landscape painter, his style is indebted to mannerist world landscapes of artists like Joachim Patinir with high viewpoints, fantastic distant perspectives and three-colour scheme. Before Verhaecht...

 and Abraham Govaerts

Abraham Govaerts

Abraham Govaerts was a Flemish Baroque painter who specialized in small cabinet-sized forest landscapes in the manner of Jan Brueghel the Elder and Gillis van Coninxloo. He became a master in Antwerp's guild of St. Luke in 1607–1608, and subsequently trained several other painters in including...

. Later in his life he also painted large altarpiece

Altarpiece

An altarpiece is a picture or relief representing a religious subject and suspended in a frame behind the altar of a church. The altarpiece is often made up of two or more separate panels created using a technique known as panel painting. It is then called a diptych, triptych or polyptych for two,...

s.

Sources

• Härting, Ursula "Francken," Grove Art Online. Oxford University Press, [7 November 2007].
• Vlieghe, Hans (1998). Flemish Art and Architecture, 1585-1700. Pelican history of art. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-07038-1

External links