Joost_van_Geel

Joost van Geel

Joost van Geel

Dutch Golden Age genre painter

Joost van Geel (1631, Rotterdam – 1698, Rotterdam), was a Dutch Golden Age genre painter in the style of Gabriel Metsu.

Grisaille portrait of Van Geel by Jacob Houbraken after a painting by Jan Maurits Quinkhard, who copied it from a self-portrait now in the Rotterdam historical museum "Het Schielandshuis".

Biography

According to Houbraken, he was never able to discover more about this painter than what he learned from a painting of a lady with a nanny and child, which he described thus: "A piece has come to my attention signed V. Geel, which shows a nanny with a child on her lap, and a mother standing at her side with a red "sulp" jacket edged in white fur quite cleverly wrapped around her, and a yellow satin skirt with natural folds, playing with the child, as if she wanted to tempt her from her nanny with a lump of sugar. I don't know if this artist was a pupil of Metzu, but the piece was so cleverly done in his manner that it could be taken for a work by his hand. I have not seen any other work by this artist and all those of whom I ask of him have never heard of him or his work, which leads me to believe that many brave souls are nipped in the bud from a lack of patronage.[1] This piece today shows the "VGeel" signature with the "L" connected to a (forged) "Metsu" signature.[2]

According to the RKD he was a pupil of Metsu and worked in Leiden, Germany, France, London, and Rijnsburg before returning to Rotterdam sometime after 1666.[3] Van Geel's painting of a lacemaker wearing a similar red "sulp" jacket was recently discovered and broadcast on the Dutch antiques television program "Tussen Kunst en Kitsch" in 2011 and valued at around 250,000 euro.[4]

  • Painting from the Antiques Roadshow
  • Painting that Houbraken described

References

  1. [1]
    (in Dutch) Joost van Geel Biography in De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen (1718) by Arnold Houbraken, courtesy of the Digital library for Dutch literature
  2. [2]
    painting record of Lady with nanny in the RKD
  3. [3]
    Joost van Geel in the RKD
  4. [4]
    Dutch Television show Tussen Kunst en Kitsch finds painting by Joost van Geel (1631-1698) on Codart
Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Joost_van_Geel, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.