VREL, Jacobus

(b. ~1630 ?, d. ~1670 ?)

Dutch painter. Some 38 paintings, depicting domestic interiors, street scenes and a church interior, have been attributed to this enigmatic artist. Four copies after his works are possibly autograph; one drawing has also been ascribed to him. Over half of Vrel’s paintings are signed or bear traces of signatures that were altered to read Johannes Vermeer or Pieter de Hooch, with whose paintings Vrel’s work was often confused. Indeed, Theophile Thoré discussed Vermeer as a townscape painter largely on the basis of works that were actually by Vrel.

An autodidacte, he is stylistically connected to Delft and Amsterdam artists such as Pieter de Hooch, Johannes Vermeer and Pieter Janssens, called Elinga. His earliest dated painting, a Woman at a Window of 1654, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna predates De Hooch’s earliest dated Delft interiors. The Sleeping Woman is a pendant of this painting, and both were acquired for Leopold Wilhelm’s gallery in Brussels, when he was governor of the Spanish Netherlands (1646-56). David Teniers the Younger was the curator for his gallery.

An Old Woman by a Fireplace

Political transformations in 17th-century Holland produced new art customers - ordinary townspeople whose tastes prompted artists to look closely at simple subjects - and a demand for small paintings to adorn middle-class houses. Among those artists who accommodated the new artistic audience was Jacobus Vrel, either a naive imitator of the Delft school or, as is suggested by some dated works, the inventor of the quiet domestic scene that the mid-17th-century genre school then took to perfection.

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Sleeping Woman (The Convalescent)

Traditionally this painting has always been called: The Convalescent, as the sleeping woman here was considered to be ill.

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The Hospital Orderly

Although Pieter de Hooch had no recorded pupils he influenced and was often imitated by other painters in Delft and Amsterdam, and since his own original works decline in his later period, his followers come at times pretty close to him, and now and then it is difficult to distinguish hands. Those whose works have been confused with his include Jacobus Vrel, but now the artistic personalities and special charms of these minor artists are more or less clear. It can be seen that other painters who made views of interiors and street scenes can be associated with the school of Delft by borrowing motifs and making variations on the compositional devices and pictorial refinements of its masters.

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