VREL, Jacobus
(active 1654-62 in Delft and Haarlem)

An Old Woman by a Fireplace

1550s
Oil on canvas, 36 x 31 cm
The Hermitage, St. Petersburg

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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