Author: Albert Elen
Baltens, son of a sculptor, who was admitted to the St Luke guild in Antwerp as a master in 1550, is a relatively unknown painter, draftsman, engraver and print publisher. As for several other artists, Karel van Mander is our main contemporary source of information for ‘Pieter Balten’ as he calls him in his Schilderboeck (1604). Baltens is described by Van Mander as “a very good landscape painter who followed very closely the manner of Pieter Brueghel and also handled the pen very cleverly”.1 However, Van Mander’s information has proved to be unreliable. In fact, the two artists were closely associated peers.2 Bruegel was documented in 1551 as Baltens’ collaborator on an altarpiece in Mechelen (now lost) and may even have been influenced by him in his first landscape drawings.3 Baltens’ known oeuvre is limited to thirteen paintings and eleven drawings, only one of which is fully signed and none dated.4
Footnotes
1 Van Mander 1618, folio 257v (ed. Miedema 1994, vol. 1, pp. 286-287).2 J. van der Stock, entry on Peeter Baltens, Grove Art Online [2016], https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T0059943 M. Royalton-Kisch, ‘Pieter Bruegel as a Draftsman: The Changing Image’, in N.M. Orenstein (ed.), Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Drawings and Prints, New York-New Haven-London 2001, pp. 13-40, esp. p. 26.4 S.J. Kostyshyn, ‘Door tsoecken men vindt’. A reintroduction to the life and work of Peeter Baltens alias Custodis of Antwerp (1527-1584), 3 vols., Cleveland (Ph.D.-thesis at Case Western University) 1995; Hautekeete 2005.
