Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of Adam van Noort, from the Iconography, etching and engraving, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Public domain

Adam van Noort

1562–1641 · Flemish (Antwerp)

Researched by Daniel Bilmes, painter and educator.

Adam van Noort (about 1562 to 1641) was an Antwerp painter remembered as a teacher. Rubens trained with him in the 1590s, between his first master and Otto van Veen, and Jacob Jordaens, who had no other master, entered his studio at fourteen in 1607 and married his daughter Catharina in 1616. The Antwerp guild registered thirty-three apprentices with him between 1587 and 1627, and in the late 1590s the city appointed him dean of the painters' guild. Almost nothing of his painting survives: as late as 1904 the Rubens scholar Max Rooses could name no certain picture by him. That changed in 1927, when cleaning revealed his monogram on a panel of Christ blessing the children, now in Brussels. The old story that he was a coarse drunkard begins with a single writer, Isaac Bullart, in 1682, and modern scholars reject it.

ProcessConstructive TemperamentMeasured LineageRenaissance

Signature moves

Run a teaching workshop, and charge for it

The Antwerp guild registered thirty-three apprentices with him between 1587 and 1627, and the training was not cheap: in 1598 a former pupil still owed him 115 guilders for board and lessons.

Why it matters · A master craftsman of the time earned less than a guilder a day, so 115 guilders was a serious investment in a place inside a working shop. That is what an apprenticeship bought: years of living with the trade, at the master's table, before anyone called you a painter.

Max Rooses, Rubens (1904), on the guild register; Nils Büttner, Antwerpener Maler, on Matthijs Willenhout's debt of 1598

Teach the rudiments, not a house style

Was remembered as a first master for beginners. Max Rooses called him "un bon maître primaire," skilled at teaching the rudiments of the trade and well liked by the young.

Why it matters · His two famous pupils went in different directions. Rubens moved on to Otto van Veen and Italy; Jordaens, who had no other master, built his whole career in Antwerp. A first teacher who installs the foundations without stamping his manner on a student leaves room for that.

Max Rooses, Jordaens, sa vie et ses oeuvres, 1906

Draw for the engravers

Made designs that Antwerp engravers cut in copper, among them a Life of Saint Catherine in thirty-two small plates engraved by Adriaen Collaert, a Five Senses and an Orpheus, and small illustrations for the Plantin press.

Why it matters · Print design paid, and it carried a painter's compositions far past his own walls. It also survives where panels perish: for van Noort, the engravings are a large part of what can still be seen of his invention.

Max Rooses, Rubens, 1904, listing the engravings after his designs

Be known for the figure

Built his reputation on figures. Karel van Mander, listing the painters of Antwerp in 1604, called him "oock fraey van Figueren," also fine at figures, and Sandrart in 1675 remembered him for his large figures.

Why it matters · The figure was the core skill a history painter's shop had to teach, and both of his famous pupils became figure painters first and last.

Karel van Mander, Het Schilder-boeck, 1604, fol. 295v; Joachim von Sandrart (1675) as cited by Rooses, 1904

Studio

Light: Not documented. No description of his studio or its light survives.
Position: Master of a workshop that trained apprentices and boarded at least some of them. In the late 1590s the city appointed him dean of the Guild of Saint Luke, an office many Antwerp painters tried to avoid: one later paid the guild 200 guilders to be excused from it for good.
Session length: Not documented for him. The Antwerp guild asked no masterpiece at the end of training; Jordaens entered the studio in 1607, at fourteen, and stayed until he became a master in October 1615.
Tools: Oil on oak panel, the support of both paintings given to him with confidence (Brussels and Düsseldorf) · Drawings, several signed with the monogram A.V.N. · Designs drawn for copper engravings, cut by Adriaen Collaert and others
Notes: When the city named him dean he was living in the Hofstraat, below the Old Bourse, in a house called the Angel. He married Elizabeth Nuyts before November 1586, had six children, and died in 1641 leaving eight houses. In 1605 to 1606 the cathedral paid him for a painting of Our Lady for the lantern; it does not survive.

Source: Antwerp Stadsarchief, Collegiale Actenboeken 1597-1599, as quoted by Nils Büttner; Max Rooses, Rubens, 1904; De Liggeren, vol. 1, 1864

Palette

Ground: Oak panel for both secure paintings. No technical study of his grounds or pigments was found, so the rest of the palette is left blank rather than guessed.
Medium: Oil, on the evidence of the two panels. Nothing more specific is documented.
Quantity: Not documented.

Source: Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, inv. 4703; Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, Moses striking water from the rock

Workflow, from blank canvas

1. Registered with the guild
A boy entered the shop as an apprentice (leerjongen), and a fee went to the Guild of Saint Luke to register him. The deans' accounts for 1588 to 1589 record 2 guilders 16 stuivers received for Joris de Camp, apprentice with Adam van Oort.
Why: The register is what makes his teaching visible at all. Thirty-three of his apprentices survive this way, from 1587 to 1627.
2. Board and training in the master's house
Apprentices could live and eat in the household. In 1598 Matthijs Willenhout, who wanted to become a master himself, first had to settle 115 guilders he owed van Noort for board and for learning to paint.
Why: The training was a long stay inside a working shop, paid for like one. The money is the clearest evidence of how much a place there was worth.
3. The rudiments, the figure above all
Beginners learned the foundations of the trade from him; his own reputation rested on figures, the skill a history painter most needed.
Why: Foundations are what a first master can give. What a pupil built on them depended on where he went next: Rubens to Otto van Veen and Italy, Jordaens straight into his own practice.
4. Free master, no masterpiece
Antwerp asked no proof piece at the end of training. Jordaens became a free master in October 1615, at the start of the guild's year, after eight years in the studio.
Why: The shop made the painter, not an examination. What counted afterward was whether the guild admitted you and whether the work found buyers.

Reference

Primary source: Not documented. No account of how he worked from models, drawings or prints survives.
Photography: Not applicable. He died in 1641.

Exceptions

His monogram A.V.N. appears on several drawings, which is how the Brussels panel was recognized as his when cleaning revealed the same monogram in 1927.

Lineage

Every teacher and student below sits on the site-wide teacher-student map.

Teachers

Lambert van Noort, his father — An Antwerp painter. Adam entered the guild in 1587 as a master's son, and no other teacher is recorded.

Students

Peter Paul Rubens, in the 1590s, between his first master Tobias Verhaecht and Otto van Veen. The guild register does not list him; the stay is known from later accounts.
Jacob Jordaens, apprentice from 1607 to 1615, who had no other master, and from 1616 his son-in-law.
Sebastiaen Vrancx, named by Karel van Mander in 1604 as having learned with him.
Hendrick van Balen, traditionally counted among his pupils.
Fernand Apshoven, Rombout Eynhoudts and Hendrik van Erp, three of the thirty-three in the guild register whose names appear elsewhere.

In their own words

“Adam van Oort, die oock fraey van Figueren is.”

— Karel van Mander, Het Schilder-boeck, fol. 295v, 1604

Van Mander's list of the painters working in Antwerp: "Adam van Oort, who is also fine at figures."

“Son premier maître fut Adam van Noort, peintre assez renommé, mais d'une humeur si grossière et si dissolue, que Rubens fut obligé à le quitter pour se mettre sous la conduite d'Octave Venius.”

— Isaac Bullart, Académie des sciences et des arts, vol. 2, p. 471, 1682

The sentence the drunkard legend grows from, written forty years after van Noort died as a ready explanation for why Rubens changed masters. No earlier source says anything like it, and later writers only embroidered it.

“Ce fut sans doute un fort digne homme.”

— Max Rooses, Jordaens, sa vie et ses oeuvres, 1906

Rooses, after setting aside the biographers who called van Noort brutal: "He was without doubt a very worthy man."

Questions and answers

Who taught Rubens?

Three masters in Antwerp: Tobias Verhaecht first, then Adam van Noort, then Otto van Veen, before Rubens left for Italy in 1600. His time with van Noort is known from later accounts; the guild register of van Noort's apprentices does not list him.

Was Jacob Jordaens Adam van Noort's son-in-law?

Yes. Jordaens entered van Noort's studio in 1607 at fourteen, stayed until he became a master in October 1615, and married van Noort's daughter Catharina in May 1616. The couple lived with her parents, and the two families were still sharing a house in 1634.

Was Adam van Noort really a drunkard?

No contemporary says so. The charge first appears in Isaac Bullart's Académie des sciences et des arts of 1682, which explained Rubens's move to Otto van Veen by van Noort's "coarse and dissolute" temper, and later writers embroidered the line. Earlier sources only praise him, and Max Rooses concluded he was "without doubt a very worthy man."

Do any paintings by Adam van Noort survive?

A few. In 1904 none could be named with certainty. In 1927 cleaning revealed his monogram on Let the Children Come to Me, an oil on oak panel bought that year by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels (inv. 4703), the first painting by him beyond dispute. The Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf holds a Moses striking water from the rock under his name. Engravings after his designs survive in greater numbers.

How many students did Adam van Noort have?

The Antwerp guild registered thirty-three apprentices with him between 1587 and 1627. Jordaens is the only famous name among them, and Rubens is not in the register at all, though he studied with him.

If this painter is your match

You believe a first teacher's job is the foundation, not a signature style, and you would rather your students outgrow you than imitate you. You know that a lot of what makes a painter is invisible in the finished work: the years of rudiments, the shop, the people who taught them.

Borrow this: Find the first teacher of a painter you admire and look at what that teacher could actually have given them. Then write down the rudiments you would teach a beginner yourself, and check whether your own work still stands on them.

Adjacent painters

Andrew Loomis1892–1959

The American illustrator-teacher who built heads from a ball and plane, unified pictures under one light with his form principle, and wrote the six drawing books painters still start with.

Louise Bourgeois1911–2010

A French-American sculptor who returned compulsively to drawing and painting through six decades of nightly insomnia, treated the daily mark as self-administered psychoanalysis, and built a private cosmology of red, spirals, spiders, and houses.

George Bridgman1864–1943

The Art Students League drawing teacher who built the figure from blocky masses set in perspective, fixed the structure and the movement before any surface detail, and trained a generation of American illustrators.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder1525–1569

A Flemish master who sketched the Alps on horseback in 1552 and for the rest of his life composed his panel paintings in the studio from a library of those drawings, a set of peasant-wedding field notes, and a habit of "moralizing" every scene through absurdist humor.

Primary sources

Ph. Rombouts and Th. van Lerius, De Liggeren en andere historische archieven der Antwerpsche Sint Lucasgilde, vol. 1, 1864. The guild registers: his 1587 entry among masters' sons, apprentice fees, and the 1605-06 cathedral payment. [link]
Max Rooses, Rubens (English edition), 1904. Thirty-three registered pupils, Rubens absent from the register, the 1607 statement of his age, his family, the engravings after his designs. [link]
Max Rooses, Jordaens, sa vie et ses oeuvres, 1906. The first master of beginners, Jordaens's only teacher, and the rejection of the "brutal" legend. [link]
Karel van Mander, Het Schilder-boeck, fol. 295v, 1604. The contemporary praise for his figures, and Vrancx as his pupil. [link]
Leo van Puyvelde, on the first undisputed painting by Adam van Noort, 1929. The A.V.N. monogram revealed by cleaning before the Giroux sale of 21 November 1927. [link]
Nils Büttner, Antwerpener Maler, zwischen Ordnung der Gilde und Freiheit der Kunst (Kunstgeschichte, Open Peer Reviewed Journal). The appointment as dean, the cost of an apprenticeship, Jordaens's years in the studio, and Bullart as the origin of the legend. [link]
Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Adam van Noort, Let the Children Come to Me, inv. 4703. Oil on oak, monogram lower left, bought at the Giroux sale, Brussels, 21-22 November 1927. [link]

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