Adriaen Brouwer Returns Home

Ask the average art-lover to name the most important seventeenth-century Flemish artists and it’s quite unlikely that Adriaen Brouwer will rarely figure in the list, even though he undoubtedly belongs there. His contemporaries admired his work. Rubens had no less than seventeen works by Brouwer. Rembrandt too had a sketchbook and several of his drawings. Van Dyck painted the master’s portrait. Very little is known with any certainty about Adriaen Brouwer. He was probably born in the Flemish town of Oudenaarde in about 1605-1606, where in late 2018 an ambitious exhibition of Brouwer’s work will be held in the local museum.