Abraham de Vries (? The Hague c. 1590/95 - ? The Hague c. 1648/50)

Abraham de Vries’s early life is sketchy, and nothing is known about his training. Although his place of birth is given in the older literature as Katendrecht (near Rotterdam), when he joined the painters’ guild in The Hague in 1644 he paid the low fee natives of the town were charged. In the absence of documents, his date of birth can only be surmised from his dated works, the earliest of which is a landscape drawing from 1613.¹¹Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum; illustrated in Foucart 1980, p. 128, fig. 1. According to the inscription on this drawing, it was executed in Lyon. De Vries is documented in Rotterdam in 1617. His earliest dated painting is the 1621 Self-Portrait in the Rijksmuseum (SK-A-2157), which was probably also executed outside of the United Provinces as it is signed ‘A. de Vries Batavus’ (A. de Vries, Dutchman). In 1623, he was in Aix-en-Provence, where he portrayed a local magistrate.²²Portrait of J.-P. d’Ollivary, Aix-en-Provence, private collection; illustrated in Foucart 1980, p. 129, fig. 2. Thanks to the preserved correspondence of the French humanist Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc, whom De Vries apparently befriended in Aix, we are well informed of the artist’s – quite frequent – movements during the rest of the 1620s. De Vries was in Aix in 1624, Montpellier and probably Béziers and Toulouse in 1625, Bordeaux in 1626, and Paris in 1627-28. From Paris, he travelled to Antwerp, where a letter of recommendation from Peiresc secured a meeting with Rubens. From documents and, especially, the inscriptions on his paintings it is known that the 1630s and 40s were also quite restless decades for the artist. In the 1630s, he was mostly active in Paris and Antwerp, joining the painters’ guild in the latter city in 1634, but also briefly in Amsterdam where his brother Isaac lived and where he portrayed the Regents of the City Orphanage in 1633.³³Amsterdams Historisch Museum; illustrated in Middelkoop 2002, p. 22, fig. 22. Between 1639 and 1643, he was in Rotterdam, after which he settled in The Hague.

In 1648, De Vries made a will, and he probably died in the same or in the following year. Payment for a portrait of Maria Elisabeth II, Marchioness of Bergen, by an artist identified simply as ‘De Vries’ was made in 1649 or 1650 not to the artist himself, but to a certain Sara de Vries. The latter may well have been the daughter of Abraham de Vries’s brother Isaac, who was born in Amsterdam in 1623.⁴⁴GAA, DTB, no. 40, p. 198, 23 January 1623 (Nieuwe Kerk).

Except for one history piece, a depiction of St Jerome inspired by Ter Brugghen that was probably painted in France in the 1620s,⁵⁵Mâcon, Monastère de la Visitation Sainte-Marie; illustrated in Foucart 1980, p. 130, fig. 5. De Vries’s extant oeuvre is composed of portraits. His work is quite varied in style as he constantly absorbed new impulses from the leading artists in the different centres in which he worked.

Among the evidence suggesting that he was held in high regard are two portraits that De Vries executed of his fellow artists, the Antwerp painter Simon de Vos, and the Amsterdam painter Gillis de Hondecoeter.⁶⁶Only De Vos’s portrait has survived; Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten; illustrated in coll. cat. Antwerp 1958, p. 235, no. 662.

Jonathan Bikker, 2007

References
Obreen III, 1880-81, p. 258; V, 1882-83, pp. 77, 102; Ruelens 1882 (letters from Peiresc); coll. cat. Rotterdam 1892, p. 268; Haverkorn van Rijsewijk 1901, p. 61; Hannema 1928, p. 433; Foucart 1980; Van Mosselveld 1982, pp. 68, 70, note 7; Ekkart in coll. cat. Rotterdam 1995, p. 198; Löffler in The Hague 1998, p. 358; Ekkart 2005b