Jacobus Vrel

Active 1654 – 1662

How To CiteBakker, Piet. "Jacobus Vrel." In The Leiden Collection Catalogue. Edited by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. NewYork, 2017.
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We are summarily informed about the lives of most Dutch Golden Age painters; however, there are someabout whom absolutely nothing is known. At present, forty works are attributed to the artist depicting
domestic interiors, street scenes, and a church interior. Almost half of them bear a signature or monogram,
together representing all of the available information regarding their maker’s identity. Their spelling varies
from “Frel,” “Frell,” “Vrel,” and “Wrel,” to “Vrelle” and even “Vreelle,” making it unclear why “Vrel” waschosen, other than that it occurs most often, albeit only three times.[1] There is slightly more certainty about
his first name, which he gave as Jacobus the only time he included it in full in his signature.
While Vrel’s place of birth has given rise to much speculation, to date no convincing answer has beenfound. He is long thought to have come from Delft, because in the nineteenth century the lion’s share of his
known oeuvre was attributed to Vermeer (from Delft), in part because the latter’s signature had been added
to many works, including the street scenes. Vrel was only really discovered after Théophile Thoré-Burger
exposed one of these Vermeer signatures as false and found Vrel’s name underneath it. Nevertheless,comparable works continued to be associated with the Delft master for a long time, until finally they too
proved to be by Vrel. With the gradual recovery of Vrel’s oeuvre, the notion that Vrel and Vermeer werefellow townsmen was abandoned. Moreover, no archival documents corroborating Vrel’s reputed Delftorigins have been found. In fact, a 1982 doctoral investigation of Vrel’s background concluded that hisname could not be linked to any town in Holland.[2] In part because of this, it has been contended that Vrel
lived outside of what are now the provinces of Noord- and Zuid-Holland. In this connection the provinces ofFriesland and Overijssel, the borderland between the Northern and the Southern Netherlands, and even
Germany have been forwarded as possibilities, but no evidence to this effect has been found.[3]Vrel’s elusiveness is further reinforced by the puzzling fact that Archduke Leopold Wilhelm owned no lessthan three works by him, which hung in his palace in Brussels until 1656, when he returned to Vienna. Twoof them can still be identified, including Interior with a Sick Woman by a Fireplace , currently in the Leiden
Collection.[4] This prominent patronage of Vrel, a genre painter, is curious, as the archduke was known as aconnoisseur of history paintings. Hence, these acquisitions can most likely be accounted for by the taste ofDavid Teniers the Younger (1610–90), Leopold’s court painter, agent, and keeper of his collection. Judging© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Jacobus Vrel
Page 2 of 4from the description of Vrel’s interior with two peasant men and one peasant woman, for example, it could
just as well have been a work by Teniers, also a genre painter.[5]To date, the 1659 inventory of Leopold’s extensive collection of paintings is the only document containing
Vrel’s name. Attempts to locate the artist in Brussels or Antwerp have proved futile, and his name is also
conspicuously absent from South Netherlandish archives. Any other outcome would have been mostremarkable since the subject matter and style of Vrel’s work is so close to that of his contemporaries Pieter
de Hooch (1629–84), Esaias Boursse (1631–72), and Pieter Janssens Elinga (1623–82) that one canhardly imagine him not working in the immediate surroundings of one of these artists. Naturally, thepossibility that Vrel’s roots, like Elinga’s, lay in the Southern Netherlands cannot be excluded. Nevertheless,Teniers could have purchased the three paintings that once hung in Brussels on one of his trips to theNorthern Netherlands.[6]The digitization of countless archival records in recent years and the access to them via the Internet haveconsiderably enriched the possibilities for identifying the artist. It is therefore rather remarkable that heremains untraceable.[7] The name Vrel (and all of the above-mentioned variations) is so rare that it begs thequestion whether it was, in fact, a surname. In Amsterdam the name is linked to just two people, only one ofwhom occurs more than once, namely Antie Vrel; sometimes as Vrel, but more often as Verel or Varel. Herbrother, Jan Verel (ca. 1614–69), was a wine merchant residing in a section of the Oude Zijds Voorburgwal
where barrels of beer were shipped in daily from Delft.[8] This is the only “Verel” in Amsterdam bearing thepainter’s possible given name.[9] Another possibility is Jacobus Verel, a local schoolmaster in Bleiswijk, avillage north of Rotterdam, close to Delft. That neither of them was an artist does not necessarily invalidate
this identification, as some art historians have contended that Vrel’s poor command of perspective suggests
he was an amateur painter.[10] It is not being asserted here that one of these two Verels was actually thepainter Vrel, an identification that would require other, more convincing evidence. It might be fruitful to findalternatives for the name Vrel, because it is highly doubtful whether this was what the painter was actuallycalled.
-Piet Bakker

Endnotes
1. This observation relies on the notes Elizabeth Alice Honig made while researching her article“Looking in(to) Jacob Vrel,” published in the Yale Journal of Criticism 3, no. 1 (1989): 37–56,
which are now part of the documentation on Vrel in the RKD. The article also contains a list ofVrel’s known paintings up to 1989.
2. J. Postma, Jacobus Vrel, de vraag naar zijn herkomst en oeuvrecatalogus (master’s thesis,Leiden University, 1982). Conclusion derived from E. A. Honig, “Looking in(to) Jacob Vrel,”Yale
Journal of Criticism 3, no. 1 (1989): 39.

© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Jacobus Vrel
Page 3 of 4

3. For a summary of these suppositions, see Peter Sutton, Masters of Seventeenth-Century
Dutch Genre Painting (Exh. cat. Philadelphia Museum of Art; Berlin, Gemäldegalerie; London,
Royal Academy of Arts, 1984), 354n1.
4. Woman at a Window, 1654, oil on panel, 66 x 47.5 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna;
and An Interior with a Woman Sleeping near a Fireplace , oil on panel 56.8 x 47.6 cm, TheKaplan Collection, New York, inv. JV 100.
5. A. Berger, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 1,
part 2 (1883): 79–177, no 758: “Ein Stückel von öhlfarb auf Holz, warin zwey Pauren unndt ein
Peurin von Jakob Fröll” (An oil painting on panel of two peasant men and a peasant woman byJakob Fröll). This comment was first noted in E. A. Honig, “Looking in(to) Jacob Vrel,”Yale
Journal of Criticism 3, no. 1 (1989): 53n8. For Teniers as court painter to and keeper ofArchduke Leopold Wilhelm’s collection, see H. Vlieghe, David Teniers, een biografie (Turnhout,2011).
6. This acquisition must have taken place between 1654, the date on one of the paintings, and1656, the year when the collection was moved to Vienna.
7. It should be noted that the Baptism, Marriage, and Burial Registers of Haarlem and The
Hague can still only be consulted on-site. The comments in this entry on the rarity of the name
Vrel, thus, do not apply to these two cities, since I have not visited these archives.
8. The building “daer de Schenkkan uythangt, eertyts genaemt de Pauw” (with the jug hanging
out, formerly called the “Pauw” [peacock]) that Jan Varel (Verel) purchased in 1649 was locatedin the section of the Oude Zijds Voorburgwal once called the Delftse Bierkaey. SAA, Archieven
van de Schout en Schepenen, (toegang 5061) Transportakten, 23 October 1649.
9. The names Verel and Varel also occur only rarely. In the Amsterdam Baptism, Marriage, andBurial Registers everyone bearing these names is related.
10. E. Plietzsch, “Jacobus Vrel und Esaias Boursse,” Zeitschrift für Kunst 3 (1949): 248–63.

Literature
Berger, A. Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses
1. Part 2 (1883): 79–177.
Plietzsch, E. “Jacobus Vrel und Esaias Boursse.” Zeitschrift für Kunst 3 (1949): 248–63.
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Jacobus Vrel
Page 4 of 4Postma, J. Jacobus Vrel, de vraag naar zijn herkomst en oeuvrecatalogus. Master’s thesis,Leiden University, 1982.
Sutton, Peter. Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting. Exh. cat. Philadelphia
Museum of Art; Berlin, Gemäldegalerie; London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1984.
Honig, Elizabeth Alice. “Looking in(to) Jacob Vrel.” Published in the Yale Journal of
Criticism 3, no. 1 (1989): 37–56.

© 2017 The Leiden Collection