LUCAS VAN VALCKENBORCH (MALINES C. 1535-1597 FRANKFURT) AND GEORG FLEGEL (OLMÜTZ 1566-1638 FRANKFURT-AM-MAIN)

Painted in Frankfurt in 1595, this is one of best surviving examples of Lucas van Valckenborch’s large-format market scenes, which became the mainstay of his artistic output in the last decade of his career. Boldly composed and executed on an impressive scale, it originally formed part of a set of Four Seasons, along with, according to Wied (op. cit., 1990, pp. 35-6), the Summer, dated 1592, now in the collection of Leopold von Sternberg at Častolovice (fig. 1). The allegories of Spring and Winter from the series are both lost.
Wied agrees with Seifertová (op. cit., 1974) that this series was most likely the one painted for Archduke Ernest of Austria. An inventory of 1595 lists among the Archduke’s paintings ‘Four large pieces on canvas of the four anni temporibus [seasons]’ attributed to ‘M. Lucas’ (I. Raband, ‘Collecting the Painted Netherlands: The Art Collection of Archduke Ernest of Austria in Brussels’, Collecting Nature, A. Gáldy and S. Heudecker, eds., Cambridge, 2014, p. 122). The Archduke, in fact, owned more than one series of paintings depicting the Months or the Seasons, including the famed cycle of six pictures by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and a set of twelve by Abel Grimmer.
Luca van Valckenborch painted as many as four cycles of large scale allegorical representations of the Seasons between 1592 and 1597, revolutionising the tradition of market scene painting, which had been pioneered by Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer in the middle of the century. In their works, religious scenes were normally incorporated into the backgrounds as a means of providing moralizing gloss on the activity in the foreground. By contrast, Valckenborch’s scenes are noteworthy for their synthesis of the foreground still-life elements and the background topographical landscape into a unified, wholly secular composition, with an emphasis on real-life commerce.
The contemporary setting for Autumn is the St Leonard’s Quay in Frankfurt, which also features in the background of an allegory of Winter, from a different series, painted in the same year (private collection). Valckenborch moved to Frankfurt from Linz in 1593 bringing his assistant Georg Flegel with him. Muller, in 1956, was first to identify the prominent role played by Flegel in Autumn, whose technical prowess is on full display in the superbly executed still-life details.