Antwerp 1586 – c.1656

Leytens became a pupil of Jacob Vrolijck in Antwerp in 1598. He joined the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke as a master in 1611.
He married Maria van Omel. Between 1617 and 1627 he had a number of pupils. Leytens’ work was originally attributed to an unidentified painter referred to as Meester van de Winterlandschappen or Master of the Winterlandscapes. Only in 1942 was P.F.J.J.Reelick able to identify Gijsbrecht Leytens with this anonymous master. This attribution was confirmed in 1988 by Dr.Ursula Härtung on the basis of a fully signed work, which was wit Kunsthandel P. de Boer in 2015.

Leytens painted mainly landscapes. All known landscapes by him are winterlandscapes except for a few such as a Mountainous Landscape with Deer in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig and a Wooded Mountainous Landscape with Waterfall and Travellers in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. It is known that he painted six marine paintings but these are lost.

Artists as Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Abel Grimmer, as well as Denijs van Alsloot and Daniël van Heil, had turned the winterlandscape Into one of the preferred subjects of the Flemish painting. The subject was taken up by Dutch painters as Hendrick Avercamp, Aert van der Neer and Anthonie Verstraelen.
Gijsbrecht Leytens work is unique in distancing itself from the austere, dreary and unsettling landscapes that rely on human figures to come to life. Leytens succeeded in created winter while avoiding a simple academic rendering showing the trivial details of human activities. His winter landscapes Shimmer in the light of sunny mornings. Leytens is regarded as the ‘poet of the frost’ since he succeeded in expressing the poetic beauty of winter by devices such as depicted the naked sun on a countryside caught in the ice. He stands out through the refinement of his subtle color harmonies.

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