Jan de Bray
(1627 - 1697) |
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Portraiture, historical narratives Art Work
| Name: |
Jan de Bray |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Haarlem |
| Nationality: |
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| Birth: |
1627 |
| Death: |
1697 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
Portraiture, historical narratives |
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| Method: |
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| Style: |
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
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Biography
| Jan Salomonsz de Bray, the only important portrait painter in Haarlem after Frans Hals died in 1666, was also a history painter of originality and sensitivity. He began as a pupil of his father Salomon. In 1661 he contributed a drawing in the album amicorum of the Amsterdam teacher Jacob Heyblock. Jan lost his parents and four siblings in the plague of 1663-64, and it has been shown that a commemorative family portrait exists in Jan's painting of Cleopatra Betting Anthony That She Can Spend More than Ten Million Ducats on a Meal (signed and dated 1669, Manchester, NH, Currier Gallery of Art). De Bray married three times (1669, 1673, and 1680), though each time he was widowed shortly thereafter. Each instance involved complex legal disputes over the estate with the families of his dead wives. Between 1667 and 1684 he served as a member of the Haarlem Painters' Guild. Between 1686 and 1688 he was active in Amsterdam. His bankruptcy in Haarlem apparently broke his spirit as an artist. Portraits by de Bray date from 1650 on. The directness, simplicity, and sympathy for his sitter displayed in Portrait of a Boy (dated 1654, The Hague, Mauritshuis) rank him as a first-rate master. Clearly independent in style from his older contemporary, Frans Hals, Jan also showed himself to be an able painter of group portraits, of which his depiction of the Regents of the Children's Charity House, Haarlem (dated 1663) and his portrait of the Regents of the Leper Hospital, Haarlem (dated 1667; both Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum) are noteworthy for their equal emphasis on each individual, while retaining a lively and spontaneous grouping. As a history painter, Jan has received well-deserved critical attention. His Judith and Holofemes (signed and dated 1659, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum) is a horrifying portrayal of vulnerability and imminent danger in which high drama is fused with mundane reality. De Bray also combined portraits with history paintings, as in the Cleopatra scene mentioned earlier. His later histories concentrate on the psychological drama inherent in his stories, as evidenced in his solemn and earnest portrayal of The Finding of Moses (dated 1661, Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen). Throughout his career Jan experimented with unusual vantage points, unusual moments within a story, and the fusion of portraiture with histories. He endowed his figures with great presence and a sense of monumentality - they often dominate and even nearly fill up the foreground plane of the picture, while retaining a sense of specificity and naturalness. |
Samples of Work
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