Bartholomeus Strobel

Bartholomeus Strobel the Younger or Bartholomäus in German or Bartlomiej in Polish (11 April 1591 (baptised) – after 1650) was a Baroque painter from Silesia, who worked in Prague, Silesia, and finally Poland, where he emigrated to escape the disruption of the Thirty Years War.

He painted portraits and religious works for the complicated ruling elites of the region and religious orders. His largest and most impressive painting, the Feast of Herod with the Beheading of St John the Baptist in the Museo del Prado, combines an ostensible religious subject with a lavish depiction of a contemporary court banquet and many portraits of leading figures in Central Europe, whose identification remains uncertain.

Strobel was born to a Protestant German family in what is now Wrocław, Poland, which he would have known by its German name of Breslau. Breslau was then part of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown within the Holy Roman Empire, with the Catholic Habsburg Monarchy in possession of both, although most of the aristocracy and gentry were Lutheran. Strobel's grandfather had moved to Breslau from Saxony, as some sort of craftsman. In the next generation, Bartholomäus the Elder was a painter, among other artistic and decorative skills, who in 1586 married the daughter of a local painter, Andreas Ruhl the Elder (d. 1567), and ran a workshop where his son Bartholomeus the Younger was trained. Bartholomeus the Younger completed a five-year apprenticeship in 1602, when the workshop had nine apprentices.

By 1610 Strobel was working in Prague, and very possibly visited Vienna, but no documentation for this survives. When Bartholomäus the Elder died in 1612, Bartholomeus the Younger was left 20 thalers and items including a painting by Bartholomeus Spranger, the court painter to Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor in Prague, the leading artistic centre in the region. His style in his history paintings remained a late, even rather archaic, continuation of the Northern Mannerism of Spranger and other artists at Rudolf's court, whose last years he participated in.

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