page_title: Jan van den Hoecke
section_title: Tapestry designs
hierarchical_section_title: Jan van den Hoecke / Work / Tapestry designs
context_page_description: Jan van den Hoecke was a Flemish painter, draughtsman and designer of wall tapestries. He was one of the principal assistants in Rubens' studio in the 1630s. He later traveled to Italy where he resided for a decade in Rome. He subsequently worked as a court painter in Vienna and Brussels. Jan van den Hoecke was a versatile artist who created portraits as well as history and allegorical paintings.
context_section_description: For Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, van den Hoecke further designed the pattern boards for a series of 12 wall tapestries on the motif of vanitas and a series of ten tapestries under the title 'Allegory of Time' (c. 1650): Day and Night, six pictures of The Months, the Four Seasons, the Four Elements and the Triumph of Time. The series of the Allegory of Time was woven between 1647 and 1650 in the Brussels tapestry workshop of Everaert Leyniers III. Several other artists such as Pieter Thijs and Adriaen van Utrecht also worked on the series. Ten preparatory oil sketches ("modelli") that van den Hoecke made for the series have survived (four in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), as have eight tapestries based on the designs for Day and Night and The Months. Four of the modelli for The Months are now in the Miramare Castle in Trieste.
  The cartoons of van Hoecke for the Allegory of Time series were innovative in that they dispensed with the traditional borders of the tapestries, which he replaced by elements of the picture such as piers, entablature and foreground step of the architecture as well as with sumptuous festoons of game, fowl, fish, flowers and fruit. He was also able to create an illusion of three-dimensional space by extending the architectural elements behind and around the figures. The muted palette of the modelli shows that van den Hoecke was more interested in line and composition than in colour.
caption: The triumph of time
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