Allegory of the month of June

This large, rediscovered landscape is a particularly fine example of Jan Wildens’ approach to the genre. One of the leading landscape painters in Antwerp in the first half of the seventeenth century, Wildens regularly collaborated with other artists, including Peter Paul Rubens, Jacob Jordaens and Frans Snyders. In 1613, almost a decade after he became a master in the Antwerp Guild of St Luke, he travelled to Italy where he encountered the work of Paul Bril. Bril had a marked influence on Wildens’ style: his landscapes became calmer, more classicising and bucolic in nature.

The present painting is an allegory of the month of June and once formed part of a series of twelve canvases. Seven canvases from a similar series executed on a comparable scale depicting the months of January, April, June, July, August, September and November and executed during Wildens’ Italian sojourn (1613-16) are today in the Galleria Palazzo Bianco, Genoa (see W. Adler, Jan Wildens: Der Landschaftsmitarbeiter des Rubens, Fridingen, 1980, pp. 96-98, nos. G13-G14, G16-G20). A second series of similar scale and composition on panel must have been painted in Genoa around 1615-16, as a view of June is today in the Prado in Madrid (inv. no. 1898).

The series to which this canvas belongs may well predate the two painted in Genoa, as a 1614 engraving by Andries Stock (fig. 1) after a preparatory drawing by Wildens now in the Fondation Custodia, Paris, likely provides a terminus ante quem. The present composition appeared again with differences in staffage in a painting sold Koller, Zurich, 17 September 2010, lot 3060, which Wolfgang Adler dated to the late 1620s or early 1630s (op. cit., p. 105, under no. G51).