Dutch painter of Flemish origin

Antwerp circa 1630 – 1669 The Hague, Leeuwarden or Amsterdam

 

Painter of portraits, genre and religious scenes.

 

His first name is sometimes spelt François.

 

Carré joined the local Painters’ Guild in The Hague in 1650. The Hague was the residence of the Stadtholder (and of his court and of foreign diplomats) and of the States of Holland, the highest sovereign power within the Dutch Republic.

 

In 1656 fourty-eight fine painters dissociated themselves from the traditional Painter’s Guild of The Hague for they said it did not defend their rights correctly; they created the so-called Confrerie Pictura.The so-called decorative painters continued to register in or to join the ancient Guild. Our painting dates from that very year, 1656.

 

In 1658 Carré moved to Amsterdam, where he started a tavern, which went bankrupt in 1661. He settled in 1662 in Leeuwarden, the capital of Friesland. Here he worked at the court of Stadtholder Willem Frederik van Nassau-Dietz (1613 – 1664), who died in a hunting accident. Carré also worked at the service of the Stadtholder’s widow, Albertine Agnes, regent of their son and young successor of her husband, Hendrik Casimir II (1657 – 1696).

 

Our painter married twice, in 1649 and before 1657. Two of his sons were also painters: Hendrick I and Michiel.

 

 

Saint Anthony was born circa 251 in Egypt. We know his life fairly well, thanks to the biography written by his disciple Athanasius.

 

Following his parents’ death he gave away his money and around the age of 20 he started a life full of want as a hermit becoming the most famous monk of ancient Christendom. He lived an ascetic life of austerity, sacrifice and extreme solitude. 

 

The first 35 years he lived retired into solitude in a grotto next to his birthplace, the following 20 years on a mountain on the other bank of the Nile and finally in a community of hermits in an oasis in the desert.

Though he led a hard life, full of deprivation, Anthony was very long-lived: death (which he had predicted) took him at the age of 105, on the 17th of January 355 (or 356).

 

Saint Anthony became a model for the denial of vice, specifically pleasures of the flesh. During his isolation he had to fight temptation by the devil under different forms, especially under that of the most seductive woman or also of wild beasts. He had to fight evil thoughts, hallucinations, lusts and desires of all kind.

 

Anthony’s veneration grew rapidly in the Western church: 

- in the 11th century a Byzantine emperor had given his relics to a French count;

- accounts of miraculous healing of skin diseases, especially those afflicted with the widely spread St. Anthony’s fire, an inflammation of the skin due to ergot poisoning, led to the founding of the Hospital Brothers of Saint Anthony;

- his life was also described in the popular ‘Legenda Aurea’ or Golden Legend. This was a medieval collection of legendary lives and accounts of miracles of important Christian saints compiled around 1260 by Jacobus de Voragine, the archbishop of Genoa.

 

The iconographical theme in painting of the temptation of Saint Anthony goes back to the late Middle Ages, to Hieronymus Bosch. It was a very popular subject in Holland and in Flanders, where we can trace a line from Pieter Brueghel I into the 17th century to David Teniers II, David Ryckaert III and Mattheus van Helmont.

 

 

Because marvellous monsters, one is even creeping from under a prostitute’s dress, try to disrupt Saint Anthony while he is reading the Holy Scripture.