GEEL, Jacob van - b. ~1585 Middelburg, d. ~1638 Dordrecht

Dutch painter. Nothing is known about his training as a painter. At some time around the turn of the century he became a member of the Middelburg Guild of Saint Luke, in which he served as both headman (1615-17) and dean (1617-18) Most of the surviving documents from his Middelburg period refer to his mounting debt. By 1626, possibly in an attempt to escape his creditors, the artist had moved to Delft. One year later Van Geel - then apparently a widower - married the widow Lisbeth Schraven. The marriage was evidently not successful, for the couple initiated divorce in 1629. Nevertheless, they were still living together at the time of Lisbeth’s death in 1632.

Van Geel was accepted into Delft’s Guild of Saint Luke in 1628. Five years later, in 1637, he is documented as a member of the painters’ guild in Dordrecht. We do not know when and where he died; his last dated painting was executed in 1637.

Landscape

This painting is an example of Van Geel’s idiosyncratic later works, which he executed in Delft and Dordrecht. In the right foreground the scene is dominated by a solid mass of trees. Below the canopy of dense foliage a few wanderers follow a path that winds past twisted trunks into the deeper recesses of the wood. Toward the left of the picture we are allowed a glimpse into a flat landscape that recedes rapidly past a clearing with trees and a few diminutive figures in the middle ground. The division of the composition into two distinct vistas reflects the Flemish tradition of landscape painting, dating back to the end of the sixteenth century.

The protagonists in this picture - as well as in many other works by Van Geel - are trees with dramatically contorted trunks and gnarled branches, in places heavily overgrown with moss and vines.