Georg Flegel
1566 – 1638
Georg Flegel was a German painter of Baroque Era, best known for his still life works.
Flegel was born in Olmütz, Moravia, 1566. He was the son of a shoemaker, and not being a Roman Catholic, probably moved to Vienna after 1580, when the Counter-Reformation began to take effect in Olmütz. There, he became the assistant to Lucas van Valckenborch I, a painter and draughtsman.
Flegel and his employer later moved to Frankfurt, which at the time was an important art-dealing city. As an assistant, he inserted items such as fruit, flowers, and table utensils into Valckenborch’s works. He followed him to Frankfurt, then an important centre for art dealing and publishing.
He filled in staffage in van Valckenborch’s pictures of the seasons and portraits, inserting fruit, table utensils and flowers as still-life set pieces. His faithful reproduction of flowers and fruit drew on watercolors by Dürer, still-life painters from the Netherlands living in Frankfurt, and botanical and zoological illustrations by Joris Hoefnagel, Pieter van der Borcht IV and Carolus Clusius then being published in Frankfurt.
In a period of about 30 years (c. 1600-1630), he produced 110 watercolor pictures, mostly still life images which often depicted tables set for meals and covered with food, flowers, and the occasional animal. Among his students were his own two sons, Friedrich and Jacob, as well as the artists Jacob Marrel and Sebastian Stoskopff.
He died in Frankfurt am Main, 1638.
