page_title: Simon de Vos
section_title: Early work: genre paintings
hierarchical_section_title: Simon de Vos / Work / Early work: genre paintings
context_page_description: Simon de Vos was a Flemish painter, draughtsman and art collector. He started his career making small-format cabinet pictures of genre scenes, in particular of Caravaggesque merry companies. Later he switched to history painting, working on larger formats in a Flemish Baroque style which was influenced by Rubens and van Dyck.
context_section_description: De Vos' first works were cabinet pictures of genre scenes, including various merry companies and group portraits.  These are composed in a Mannerist, pyramidical construction.  The settings are loosely sketched in and the colours are rich and often gaudy. His style in this period is close to that of the German painter Johann Liss—active in Italy during the 1620s— (particularly in the Caravaggesque treatment of the merry company scenes) and Frans Francken the Younger.  It also showed the influence of the Caravaggists of Utrecht.
  An example of a painting from this period is the Gathering of Smokers and Drinkers (Louvre Museum, Paris) of 1626.  The painting depicts three young men at half-length who are enjoying a pipe and a glass of wine.  The persons represented are assumed to be Simon de Vos himself (in the middle), flanked on the left by Jan Cossiers and on the right by Johan Geerlof.  Cossiers and Geerlof were two artist friends of de Vos who had also settled in Aix-en-Provence.  Typical for his early work, Simon de Vos painted the faces in this composition with thick features and eyes set wide apart.  The painting's composition, tightly framing three half-length figures, is clearly influenced by the Caravaggists of Utrecht.  Simon de Vos used the light effects typical of the Caravaggists by lighting the artists' faces from the painting's left-hand side, making the faces stand out against the neutral background.  The inspiration for the picture may have been the early works of Caravaggio himself, which Simon de Vos may have seen if he visited Rome.
  His works from the late 1620s until around 1640, which were made after returning to Antwerp, are mostly small "merry company" and courtly genre scenes reminiscent of contemporary Dutch painters Dirck Hals and Pieter Codde.
caption: Village procession, 1640
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