Johann Aken – zapomniany malarz obszaru bałtyckiego i jego dzieła

Abstract

The paper deals with a 17th painter, active in the Baltic area, that was until now virtually unknown outside Estonia. In the Tallinn town hall there exists a locally renowned cycle of paintings made by Johann Aken with an assistant and signed by him in 1667. The biblical scenes, illustrating examples of burgher and Christian virtue and extolling good government, are remarkably largely based on prints after two great Netherlanders – Rembrandt and Rubens, apart from the popular graphic work of Matthaus Merian. This reaching out to Rembrandt’s oeuvre for artistic patterns in an outlying region was noticed as early as 1906 by Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, who spotted the same phenomenon with regard to a large Ecce Homo painting, dated 1647, in a village church in Hela (Hel), now in the National Museum in Gdańsk (Danzig): the picture is based on Rembrandt’s Christ before Pilate etching. Neither this scholar, however, nor his followers, linked the Tallinn and Gdańsk compositions to one another. Estonian researchers managed to unearth, in time, an extensive judicial document from 1663, concerning Aken’s imputed bigamy, which was eventually proven false. Sideline information from the source discloses the painter worked in Reval (Tallinn) since early 1662, but came from Danzig. This, in turn, led the author of the present paper to compare the Tallinn city hall works with the one in Gdańsk: it seems that apart from some minor differences, perhaps in part resulting from later overpainting, all these works were made by the same hand. Identical average quality painterly handling, representation of somewhat puppetlike human figures and an interest towards depicting architecture settings – both a bit erroneous as far as anatomy and perspective is concerned – are discernible in some other pictures preserved in Gdansk and its whereabouts. These include a Return of the Prodigal Son in St. Anne’s chapel (c. 1650), a ceiling consisting of nine paintings from a burgher’s house, now in Old Town City Hall (1642 ?), and a Visitation, altar retable in the cathedral church in Gdańsk-Oliwa (1645). Especially the latter two show in some details considerable proximity with the Tallinn cycle, and all of these works are again mostly based on Netherlandish prints, including some by Rembrandt and some after Rubens. No archival evidence on Aken seems to have survived in Gdańsk, this proving, however, that the artist was not a guild member there. Nonetheless, further discovered sources inform he appeared in Lubeck in 1656, baptizing there his son, and was buried in St. Peter’s church in Riga in 1689. The decision to move to the former town was probably made in order to escape a major Polish- Swedish war that began in 1655. In any case, neither in Lubeck, nor in today’s Latvia any traces of his further activity may be found. This first attempt to produce a more general biographical sketch of Johann Aken, who was most probably born c. 1610, still leaves open two important questions. First, whether he was a Netherlander by descent, as suggested in literature (at one point, his Gdańsk ‘Ecce Homo’ panel was attributed to a Dutchman, Helmich van Twenhuysen), and second – this issue tied to the former – why did he choose so many then recent and very novel graphic patterns by Rembrandt to produce his thematically typical and artistically average pictures current in the region of Europe where he practiced his proffesion.