Background
Artus Wolffort was born in Antwerp and moved with his parents to Dordrecht in the year of his birth. Their son Johannes Artusz (better known as January Baptist Wolfaerts) was born in November 1625 and later became a painter.
Artus Wolffort was born in Antwerp and moved with his parents to Dordrecht in the year of his birth. Their son Johannes Artusz (better known as January Baptist Wolfaerts) was born in November 1625 and later became a painter.
He trained as a painter in Dordrecht where he joined the local Guild of Saint Luke in 1603. During this period he lived in the house of van Veen. His pupils Pieter van Lint and Pieter van Mol worked for a while as copyists in his workshop.
Artus Wolffort was one of the artists who worked on the decorations for the Joyous Entry into Antwerp of the new governor of the Habsburg Netherlands Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand in 1635.
Rubens was in overall charge of this project for which Wolffort made decorative paintings after designs by Rubens. He died in Antwerp. In the beginning of his career Wolffort completed a number of commissioned altarpieces for churches in Antwerp such as the Ascension of the Virgin and the Assumption of the Virgin (Street Paul"s Church, Antwerp, 1617).
He worked, however, mainly for private patrons for whom he painted mainly religious and, to a lesser extent, mythological subjects. He made a series of representations of the Twelve Apostles, the Four Evangelists and the Church Fathers, in half life-size.
If the attribution to Wolffort is correct, a genre painting called The scullery maid (probably 1633, M - Museum Leuven) shows that Wolffort also created genre scenes for the market.
His early works were in the classizing style of Otto van Veen. Wolffort regularly used themes and motifs of van Veen in these early works, which were executed in a proto-Baroque style. The composition itself is loosely based on Rubens" work of the same subject in the Hermitage Museum, Saint St. Petersburg, but reversed.
A more dynamic Baroque style influenced by Rubens arose after 1630.
He became a member of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke in 1617.
