Alexander Keirincx

Keirincx was a specialist landscape painter who is known for his wooded landscapes with figures and portrayals of English castles and country houses. His career and contributions to art history and especially to the development of painting in Britain have long been obscured by mistaken identity, lack of documentation and variant name spellings. In particular, he has erroneously been identified with the English painter Jacob or Johann Carings or Cierings (c. 1590–1646).

Like his presumed master Abraham Govaerts, Keirincx initially specialized in small cabinet-sized forest landscapes in the manner of Jan Brueghel the Elder and Gillis van Coninxloo. Also like Govaerts, Keirincx's early works typically show history, mythological or biblical subjects within a Mannerist three-color, schematic landscape bracketed by repoussoir trees. However, during the 1620s and 1630s, his landscapes become increasingly naturalistic, influenced by Dutch tonalism in the manner of Pieter de Molyn, Jan van Goyen and others.

A key event in Keirincx's career was his sojourn in England during which he received a commission of King Charles I of ten landscape paintings. These depicted mainly views of the king's castles and houses in Northern England and Scotland produced between May 1639 and mid-1640. Charles' commission was likely politically motivated, originally intended to celebrate his campaign and victory over the Scots during the first of the Bishops' Wars and when that didn't materialize, a face-saving measure upon the return of his properties by the Scots. One example, Distant View of York at Tate Britain, shows an important site in the campaign of the First Bishops' War. The importance of this series and its impact on later painting in Britain is hard to overstate, as Keirincx combined the aesthetic landscape tradition with that of the taste for detailed, topographical views, firmly grounded in Caroline court culture. His are the first "house portraits" which became a well-established trend in painting in Britain by the later 17th century as practiced for example by Jan Siberechts and Jan Griffier the Elder.

Seventeenth-century artistic practice often relied on collaborations between specialist painters. Keirincx was the most frequent collaborator of the Dutch painter Cornelis van Poelenburgh. While the two artists lived near each other in Utrecht during the period between 1632 and 1636 and in London from 1637 to 1641, their collaboration was not limited to those years. In their collaborations Keirincx usually painted the landscape to which Poelenburgh added the figures. However, in one instance it was Poelenburgh who painted the landscape and figures to which Keirincx added a tree. Fifteen paintings have survived on which they have collaborated, but the artists likely collaborated on more works. Two of the collaborations are signed by both artists, one by Van Poelenburgh only, and most of the others by Keirincx alone. The paintings signed by both artists are the Arcadian landscape with dancing figures (1633, Kunsthalle Bremen) and the Landscape with Callisto (1629, Musée Fabre). Infrared reflectography revealed that in the Forest landscape with figures, van Poelenburgh made some adjustments to the landscape painted first by Keirincx, likely to integrate his figures better into the landscape.