Cornelis de Vos

Variant namesauktoriserad namnform: Cornelis de Vos

DatesBiographical dates: 1584 - 1651 Dead: dead 1651 Born: born 1584

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BiographyBiography: Portraitist, history- and genre painter. Born at Hulst in Zeeland, his family moved, in 1596, to Antwerp, Cornelis de Vos became a pupil of David Remeers in 1599. After 1604 he may have travelled before settling again in Antwerp by 1608, the year he enrolled as a master in the local Guild of St. Luke, of which he was later elected dean in 1619 and high dean (opperdeken) the following year. In 1616 he acquired Antwerp citizenship. De Vos was also active as an art dealer and in this capacity he visited Paris in 1619 and in subsequent years. De Vos married Suzanne Cock, a half-sister of the landscapist Jan Wildens, in 1617. His brother Paul was also a painter; his sister Margaretha married animal and still life painter Frans Snyders in 1611. Along with artists such as Jacob Jordaens, De Vos worked with Peter Paul Rubens on the decorations for the Pompa Introitus Ferdinandi, the triumphal entry of Archduke Ferdinand into Antwerp in 1635, and on those of the Torre de la Parada, the hunting lodge near Madrid of King Philip IV of Spain in 1637. He died at Antwerp a successful and wealthy man. A fine, if conservative, portrait painter, De Vos became the premier portraitist of patrician Antwerp society from the early 1620s until the mid-1630s. Influenced by Rubens’ portraits of the 1610s and, especially, by those of the young Anthony van Dyck, De Vos’ carefully observed and probing likenesses emphasize, in the costumes and formal settings, the qualities of solid prosperity associated with his upper middle class clientele rather than the courtly grace and refinement expressed by Van Dyck. The strength of his early, well-balanced and attractively coloured portraits lies in the strong plasticity of the sharply lit faces, modelled with broad brushstrokes. While his earliest portraits are characterized by the detailed, meticulous and decorative representation of interiors, from about the mid-1620s onwards he began introducing opened-up backgrounds and distant views of scenery. In some of the later examples of his popular and attractive life-size family group portraits, painted after c. 1634, De Vos experimented with more innovative arrangements. A large part of his oeuvre is devoted to portraiture, but he also painted Caravaggesque genre scenes, and history paintings strongly influenced by Rubens in their composition and execution. De Vos had seven recorded pupils between 1615 and 1642, among them the genre and history painter Simon de Vos (1615) and Willem Eversdyck (1633).

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