Rest on the flight into Egypt

Old woman selling eggs

The Preaching of St John the Baptist

The subjectof this painting was very popular in the Netherlands among Protestants and Catholics alike in the closing years of the 16th century. This painting, with its colorful figures, is the most impressive of the versions that the Catholic Bloemaert painted of the subject.

Landscape with the Ministry of John the Baptist

Adoration of the Magi

Warrior and Young Standard-Bearer

The Emmaus Disciples

The tableau presents the biblical scene in which Jesus - in a gesture that refers back to the Last Supper - breaks bread and in so doing confirms his resurrection from the dead to two of his disciples, who had not recognized him until then (Luke 24, 13-35).

Moses Striking the Rock

The Four Evangelists

Virgin and Child

The Baptism of Christ

Using figure groups and landscape motifs, Bloemaert divides his picture thematically in order to highlight the different stages of the sacrament of baptism. At the extreme left, a bearded man admonishes a candidate who is disrobing in preparation for baptism, and who is depicted fully undressed near the centre of the composition. The actual baptism of Christ is given a modest place in the background, dwarfed by the final scene at the right representing the three Ages of Man beneath the Holy Ghost descending from the clouds.

The Marriage of Cupid and Psyche

The composition of the painting is inspired by a large engraving of the Marriage of Cupid and Psyche by Hendrik Goltzius, made after a drawing of 1587 by Bartholomeus Spranger. The rectangular format of the engraving was favored by Bloemaert for another version of the subject now at Aschaffenburg, Bavaria. This compositional dependency on Spranger's work is echoed in the similarity of style, which in turn suggests an early date of about 1595 for the painting.

Parable of the Wheat and the Tares

In this painting the landscape functions as the setting of a biblical story.  The key figure is the little man with horns lurking in the background: the devil who sows tares among the wheat while the peasants are asleep (Matthew 13:25).

Landsape with Peasants Resting

His peasant landscape contains certain Mannerist elements such as the large distance between the foreground objects and the sweeping horizon, or in the way in which he has united contrasts. The aspects of Boemaert's work adopted by Dutch landscape painters are the picturesque elements evident in his rendering of nature and architecture.

Charikleia and Theagenes

This rare subject was taken from the Aethiopica, a Greek novel of A.D. 240 written by a Phoenician, Heliodorus, and devoted to an Ethiopian adventure that takes place in the Nile Delta. Attacked by pirates (at the upper right), the hero, the Grecian maiden Charikleia, kneels over her wounded mate Theagens.

Amaryllis and Mirtillo

Shepherd an Shepherdess

The symbolism of Christ and Christians as shepherd and sheep is founded on the parables of Luke (15:3-7) and John (10:1-18). Its translation into visual terms is largely confined to early Christian art. It is rarely enCountered in painting after the Middle Ages. The shepherd became element of pastoral scenes.

The Bagpiper

Death of Niobe's Children

Adoration of the Shepherds

Bloemaert settled in Utrecht in 1593, and within a decade began to adopt the mild classicism that Goltzius had brought back from Italy. Utrecht was the leading Catholic centre in the northern Netherlands during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and even during the seventeenth century, when Catholicism was suppressed, it continued to keep something of its Catholic character. Bloemaert, a devout Catholic, received commissions for large altarpieces from patrons in both the northern and southern Netherlands, and many of his more than 600 prints were intended for a Catholic clientele.

Adoration of the Magi

The Catholic painter Abraham, resident in predominantly Catholic Utrecht, painted spectacular altarpieces in the style reminiscent of sixteenth-century Italian painting. He painted this altarpiece, one of his largest, for the church of the Catholic order of the Jesuits in Brussels, in the Southern Netherlands. Such commissions were extremely rare in the Dutch Republic.

Landscape with the Prophet Elijah in the Desert

Landscape with Tobias and the Angel

Cimon and Iphigenia

Adoration of the Shepherds

An elderly man, bust-length, in a brown coat and hat; and An elderly woman, bust-length, in  brown coat and headscarf a pair of 2

The Adoration of the Shepherds

Vertumnus and Pomona

Pomona, the classical goddess of fruit, and Vertumnus, the god of transformation, are the main figures in an episode in Ovid's Metamorphoses which is depicted here. Vertumnus enters Pomona's grove in order to convince her of his love. Because she had always run away on previous occasions when he came, he has cunningly dressed as an old woman on this occasion. By telling her about the allegory of the grapevine and elm, he is able to convince her of the importance of togetherness, for the grapevine needs something it can climb up and the elm, when considered on its own, i useless. Persuaded, Pomona gives in to love and her innermost longings and they become a couple.

A landscape with farm buildings on fire