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Pieter Vanderlyn
1687–1778
Death placeShawangunk, New York, United States of America
BirthplaceHolland
BiographyPieter Vanderlyn was one of several painters who flourished in the upper Hudson River Valley region of New York between 1715 and 1750. Little is known of Vanderlyn’s life and career. He was born in Holland in about 1687, and served with the Dutch navy off the coast of Africa. Vanderlyn arrived in New York via Curaçao, a Dutch possession in the southern Caribbean Sea, around 1718, the year he married and joined the Dutch Reformed Church in New York. He became a naturalized citizen of New York, then an English province. Between 1730 and 1745 Vanderlyn traveled frequently between Albany and Kingston, New York. He was living in Kingston during the Revolutionary War when the city was burned by the British, forcing him to flee to nearby Shawungunk, where he died the following year. Vanderlyn’s grandson John (1776–1852) became a prominent painter of dramatic scenes from history and literature in the early years of the nineteenth century. An unpublished manuscript account of his life provides the scant information available about his grandfather.
Like most of his artistic contemporaries, Vanderlyn never signed his paintings, but he did inscribe several of them. Based on similarities between the handwriting style of these inscriptions and a manuscript by Vanderlyn, oral tradition in the families of some sitters, and this artist’s residence in proximity to them, scholar Mary Black in 1969 identified Vanderlyn as the painter of a group of stylistically similar works, among them the Terra Foundation's Portrait of Mrs. Myndert Myndertse (Jannetje-Persen) and her Daughter Sara (TF 1992.138). These works traditionally have been assigned to an unidentified painter dubbed the Gansevoort Limner for his portraits of members of the Gansevoort family (“limner” was a common term in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America for painters of plain portraits). This artist and his contemporaries have been termed “patroon [pattern] painters” because each tended to portray sitters according to his own consistent, identifiable stylistic template. The portraits attributed to the Gansevoort Limner are recognizable for their flat, stiff poses and thinly applied paint with earth tones predominating. The painter endowed his sitters with distinctive thin, straight lips; small, almond-shaped eyes; strongly drawn noses; and large hands with long fingers and clearly articulated fingernails. The identification of Vanderlyn with the Gansevoort Limner has remained controversial, however, and details of Vanderlyn’s career await further research and the rediscovery of additional works.
Like most of his artistic contemporaries, Vanderlyn never signed his paintings, but he did inscribe several of them. Based on similarities between the handwriting style of these inscriptions and a manuscript by Vanderlyn, oral tradition in the families of some sitters, and this artist’s residence in proximity to them, scholar Mary Black in 1969 identified Vanderlyn as the painter of a group of stylistically similar works, among them the Terra Foundation's Portrait of Mrs. Myndert Myndertse (Jannetje-Persen) and her Daughter Sara (TF 1992.138). These works traditionally have been assigned to an unidentified painter dubbed the Gansevoort Limner for his portraits of members of the Gansevoort family (“limner” was a common term in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America for painters of plain portraits). This artist and his contemporaries have been termed “patroon [pattern] painters” because each tended to portray sitters according to his own consistent, identifiable stylistic template. The portraits attributed to the Gansevoort Limner are recognizable for their flat, stiff poses and thinly applied paint with earth tones predominating. The painter endowed his sitters with distinctive thin, straight lips; small, almond-shaped eyes; strongly drawn noses; and large hands with long fingers and clearly articulated fingernails. The identification of Vanderlyn with the Gansevoort Limner has remained controversial, however, and details of Vanderlyn’s career await further research and the rediscovery of additional works.