Jacob Grimmer Biography | Oil Painting Reproductions

Jacob Grimmer rural scenes and landscapes of views around Antwerp marked an important development in sixteenth-century Flemish landscape painting. His work influenced the next generation of Flemish landscape painters.

Both Pieter Lastman and his acclaimed pupil, Rembrandt, owned landscapes by Grimmer. Rembrandt's inventory of 1656 included a winter landscape by Jacob Grimmer.

Jacob Grimmer has been viewed as an imitator who reproduced Pieter Brueghel the Elder's creative innovations on small panels and supplied these to the art market at low prices. Grimmer's landscapes did at the same time constitute a further development in the landscape genre.

Grimmer's work stands out in its capacity to give a straightforward and genuine perspective of the regular day-to-day existence of people. In this attention to rural life, Grimmer's work demonstrates a parallel with the scenes attributed to the Pieter Brueghel the Elder which was first published around 1560 and signaled a move away from the landscape with its religious scenes towards an engagement with the real-life in the countryside.

Unlike Pieter Brueghel the Elder who had a grim view of peasants and their life, Grimmer held a sunnier view of peasant life. Jacob Grimmer surviving pictures show an unequivocal association with the area around Antwerp. Some of his perspectives of Antwerp hold fast to the “town-and-country” format, a kind of combination of a rural view with a city view.

Grimmer's work was influential on the next generation of Flemish landscape painters including his son Abel Grimmer as well as Gillis van Coninxloo, Jan Brueghel the Younger and Jan Wildens. As was the regular practice in the Antwerp art sector, Jacob Grimmer collaborated with other specialist artists.

Art Movement: Northern Renaissance.
Artists Influencing Jacob Grimmer: Matthys Cock, Christian van den Queborn.
Painters Jacob Grimmer Influenced: Rembrandt, Gillis van Coninxloo, Jan Brueghel the Younger, Jan Wildens.
Artist's Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.