Jacob Adriaensz Backer

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The Hearing by Jacob Backer (1635), oil painting, Magyar Szépmüvészeti Múzeum, Budapest
Company of Cornelis de Graeff and luitenant Hendrick Lauwrensz by Jacob Backer (1642)
Perhaps this portrait of a woman in an armchair by Backer seemed more attractive to the sitter mentioned by Sandrart than the portraits by Frans Hals of her Haarlem contemporaries, the Voogt sisters, and that is why she travelled to Amsterdam for her portrait to be done.

Jacob Adriaensz Backer (1608 – 27 August 1651) was a

Rubens and Abraham Bloemaert
. He is also noted for his drawings of male and female nudes.

Biography

Backer was born in

Hendrick Uylenburgh. Backer never married, never bought a house, and might have lived with his brother or nephew Adriaen Backer, who also became a portrait painter. He died in Amsterdam
, in his early forties.

Work

His extreme quickness in painting portraits has been particularly noticed, and Joachim von Sandrart wrote in his Teutsche Academie that a woman came from Haarlem and went home the same day, in which short period of time her portrait, cuffs, fur, collar, together with the rest of her dress and both hands, was handsomely completed in a life-sized half-length.[1][2][3] This remark refers both to the success of the wet-on-wet technique practised in the Netherlands at that time, as well as the fact that the trekschuit, which was a new invention in 1632, allowed regular comfortable transport between Haarlem and Amsterdam and made such trips to portrait painters possible.

Besides being an important portrait painter—some 70 portraits can be attributed to him with certainty—Backer was an excellent painter of religious and mythological paintings. He was especially interested in pastoral subjects, themes from contemporary history, like Granida and Daifilo, and the huge Crowning of Mirtillo from 1641 in the

National Museum in Warsaw (c. 1633). The artist excelled in painting hands and feet. He never painted a town or landscape. He was a leading artist in Amsterdam until his premature death in 1651. He was buried in the Noorderkerk
.

A major exhibition of Jacob Backer's work was displayed at the

Rembrandthuis
from 29 November 2008 to 22 February 2009.

Selected works
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Jacob Adriaensz. Backer.

References

  1. ^ Quote from Backer biography in the Teutsche Academie
  2. Digital library for Dutch literature
  3. ^ Rose, Hugh James (1857). "Bakker, James". A New General Biographical Dictionary. Vol. 3 BAH–BEE. London: B. Fellowes et al. p. 45.
  4. ^ William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts (1965). Drawings: collection of Milton McGreevy. Archetype Publications. p. 23. From 1632 to 1634, he studied with Rembrandt
  5. ISBN 9780415022408
    . Backer was one of the most independent pupils of Rembrandt
  6. ^ Paul Huys Janssen, Werner Sumowski (1992). The Hoogsteder Exhibition of Rembrandt's Academy. Hoogsteder & Hoogsteder. p. 89. Backer proved susceptible to Rembrandt's style for, as the leading artist, he was all the rage.
  • Peter van den Brink et al. (2008) Jacob Backer (1608/9-1651).
  • Walter Liedtke (2007) Dutch paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

External links

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