Flemish Community acquires Jacob Jordaens drawing for display at Museum Plantin-Moretus

Jacob Jordaens (Antwerp 1593–1678 Antwerp), The Triumph of Minerva, c. 1655–1660, red and black chalks, watercolour and bodycolour over charcoal on a sheet composed of three subsidiary sheets on laid paper, 38 × 60 cm (15 × 23 5/8 in.), with the collection mark of Sir Joshua Reynolds lower right.

ANTWERP.— Following its recent sale by Colnaghi, Jacob Jordaens's The Triumph of Minerva has entered the Collection of the Flemish Community and is now on display at the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp, where it will remain on view until 5 July 2026. The acquisition secures for public ownership one of the most important surviving drawings by the artist to have remained in private hands and returns to Antwerp a work whose subject is deeply connected to the city's own history.

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Executed around 1655–60, The Triumph of Minerva belongs to the final decades of Jordaens’s career. The composition centres on Minerva, goddess of wisdom, crowned by Time and holding the shield of Medusa and the palm of victory. Around her gather Mercury, Hercules, Bellona, Fame and a multitude of allegorical figures, while Mars sits defeated in the foreground, his armour and weapons scattered beneath him. As Roger-Adolf d’Hulst observed, the drawing constitutes an allegory of peace and prosperity, celebrating the triumph of wisdom over conflict and the flourishing of civic life that follows the end of war. The figure presenting tribute to Minerva has even been interpreted as a personification of the city of Antwerp itself.

The subject was particularly resonant in the decades following the Treaty of Münster of 1648, which brought an end to the Eighty Years’ War. Across the Southern Netherlands, peace was celebrated not only as a diplomatic achievement but as the necessary condition for commerce, stability and artistic production. Jordaens’s drawing reflects this broader political culture. Mercury, the god of commerce, appears among the assembled figures, while Fame sounds her trumpet above. Together they articulate a vision of civic prosperity restored through peace. The composition presents a world in which trade, learning and the arts thrive under Minerva’s protection once the destructive forces of war have been subdued.

By the time this drawing was executed, Jordaens occupied a position of extraordinary prominence within Antwerp. Having entered the Guild of Saint Luke in 1615 as a waterschilder, or watercolour painter, he went on to establish one of the most successful workshops in the city. During the 1630s he collaborated on major decorative projects associated with the Habsburg court, including the celebrations organised for the entry of Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand into Antwerp and the decoration of Philip IV’s hunting lodge. Following Rubens’s death in 1640, Jordaens emerged as Antwerp’s leading painter, producing altarpieces, mythological scenes, tapestry designs and monumental decorative programmes for patrons across Europe.

Scholars have suggested that The Triumph of Minerva may have been conceived in relation to one of the large decorative commissions executed for the Guild of Saint Luke around 1665, of which only fragments survive today. If so, the subject would have carried a particular significance. As Antwerp’s historic guild of artists and craftsmen, the institution embodied the close relationship between civic prosperity and artistic production. The triumph of Minerva over Mars would have served as an eloquent visual statement of the conditions under which culture itself could flourish.

The drawing is equally important for what it reveals about Jordaens’s working methods. Executed in red and black chalk with watercolour and opaque bodycolour over charcoal, the sheet is composed of three subsidiary sheets joined together. Comparison with related versions has demonstrated that the composition was once larger and subsequently trimmed. A closely related drawing in the Morgan Library & Museum in New York and a studio copy preserved in Antwerp indicate that additional figures and passages of landscape originally extended beyond the present boundaries of the sheet. Such evidence offers a rare insight into Jordaens’s creative process, revealing how compositions were expanded, revised and reconfigured during their development.

The work also possesses an exceptional collecting history. It once belonged to Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first President of the Royal Academy and one of the most influential collectors of Old Master drawings in eighteenth-century Britain. Reynolds’s collector’s mark remains visible at the lower right of the sheet, bearing witness to the drawing’s early recognition as an important example of Flemish draughtsmanship. In the twentieth century it entered the collection of Professor Roger-Adolf d’Hulst, the foremost scholar of Jordaens and author of the landmark catalogue Jordaens Drawings (1974), which remains one of the foundational studies of the artist’s graphic work.

The drawing has long occupied a distinguished place within Jordaens scholarship. It was exhibited in Antwerp as early as 1905 and later featured in major exhibitions devoted to the artist, including presentations at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Museum Plantin-Moretus and the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen. Its acquisition by the Flemish Community therefore represents a significant moment in the preservation of Flemish cultural heritage, ensuring that a major work by one of Antwerp’s greatest artists is now permanently accessible to the public in the city where it was conceived more than three and a half centuries ago.