BOR, Paulus
(b. 1605, Amersfoort, d. 1669, Amersfoort)

Ariadne

1630-35
Oil on canvas, 149 x 106 cm
Muzeum Narodowe, Poznan

Paulus Bor is one of the most remarkable artists of the seventeenth century. He was a man of substantial means and was presumably not dependent on his income from painting. For this reason, perhaps, his pictures look like the work of an intellectual dilettante, not unlike those by his fellow townsman Jacob van Campen. Bor seldom signed or dated his pictures, and it is therefore difficult to attribute or date them. His extraordinary paintings, many of which are strange compositions rendered in an almost primitive technique, are all the more unusual because they are often of obscure and enigmatic subjects.