BRAKENBURG, Richard

Dutch painter. A native of Haarlem, Brakenburg was the student of Hendrick Mommers. The greatest influence on his work, however, was Jan Steen, and Brakenburg's most accomplished works have often been attributed to Steen.

Brakenburg, together with Cornelis Dusart, belonged to the second generation of students of Adriaen van Ostade. In his work the peasant genreGLOSSARYIn a broad sense, the term is used to mean a particular branch or category of art; landscape and portraiture, for example, are genres of painting, and the essay and the short story are genres of literature. became overlaid with petit-bourgeois mannerismGLOSSARYA movement in Italian art from about 1520 to 1600. Developing out of the Renaissance, Mannerism rejected Renaissance balance and harmony in favor of emotional intensity and ambiguity. In Mannerist painting, this was expressed mainly through severe distortions of perspective and scale; complex and crowded compositions; strong, sometimes harsh or discordant colors; and elongated figures in exaggerated poses. In architecture, there was a playful exaggeration of Renaissance forms (largely in scale and proportion) and the greater use of bizarre decoration. Mannerism gave way to the Baroque. Leading Mannerists include Pontormo, Bronzino, Parmigianino, El Greco and Tintoretto. and pictorial style became a cultivated convention.