Jan van Vucht

1603 – 1637

Jan van Vucht (also Johannes van der Vught), Dutch painter. He studied in Delft with the earliest known architectural painter in the Northern Netherlands, the renowned Bartholomeus van Bassen in c. 1622. In 1624 he was back in his native Rotterdam, where he married Annetge Gerrits Rentier (d. 1665). It is not known when he entered the Guild of Saint Luke of Rotterdam, but by the year 1627 he was settled as an independent master. In that year records identify him as the teacher of Anthonie de Lorme, who specialized in depicting realistic interiors of existing architectural structures. Jan van Vucht was strictly an architectural painter and his surviving oeuvre is relatively small. He favoured the Renaissance revival of Classical architecture and used this idiom to compose the structures of his fantasy temples, palaces and churches. Among the most important sources for his paintings were the works by the Antwerp architectural painters Hendrick Steenwijck the Elder and Peeter Neeffs the Elder. The prints with studies of Italian Renaissance architecture by Hans Vredeman de Vries strongly influenced his works. Jan van Vucht sometimes collaborated with genre painters, such as Anthonie Palamedesz. from Delft, who added the staffage to the interiors.

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