VUCHT, Jan van

Jan van Vucht (also Johannes van der Vught), Dutch painter. He studied in Delft with the earliest known architectural painter in the Northern Netherlands, the renowned Bartholomeus van Bassen in c. 1622. In 1624 he was back in his native Rotterdam, where he married Annetge Gerrits Rentier (d. 1665). It is not known when he entered the GuildGLOSSARYAn association of the masters of a particular craft, trade or profession (painters, goldsmiths, surgeons, and so on) set up to protect its members' rights and interests. Such guilds existed in virtually every European city in the 16th century. The guild also monitored standards of work, acted as a court for those who brought their trade into disrepute, and provided assistance to members in need. of Saint Luke of Rotterdam, but by the year 1627 he was settled as an independent master. In that year records identify him as the teacher of Anthonie de Lorme, who specialized in depicting realistic interiors of existing architectural structures.

Jan van Vucht was strictly an architectural painter and his surviving oeuvreGLOSSARYThe complete body of works created by an artist. is relatively small. He favoured the Renaissance revival of ClassicalGLOSSARYRelating to the culture of ancient Greece and Rome (classical Antiquity). The classical world played a profoundly important role in the Renaissance, with Italian scholars, writers, and artists seeing their own period as the rebirth (the "renaissance") of classical values after the Middle Ages. The classical world was considered the golden age for the arts, literature, philosophy, and politics. Concepts of the classical, however, changed greatly from one period to the next. Roman literature provided the starting point in the 14th century, scholars patiently finding, editing and translating a wide range of texts. In the 15th century Greek literature, philosophy and art - together with the close study of the remains of Roman buildings and sculptures-expanded the concept of the classical and ensured it remained a vital source of ideas and inspiration. architecture and used this idiom to compose the structures of his fantasy temples, palaces and churches. Among the most important sources for his paintings were the works by the Antwerp architectural painters Hendrick Steenwijck the Elder and Peeter Neeffs the Elder. The prints with studies of Italian Renaissance architecture by Hans Vredeman de Vries strongly influenced his works.

Jan van Vucht sometimes collaborated with genreGLOSSARYIn a broad sense, the term is used to mean a particular branch or category of art; landscape and portraiture, for example, are genres of painting, and the essay and the short story are genres of literature. painters, such as Anthonie Palamedesz. from Delft, who added the staffageGLOSSARYThis word, pronounced as French, is used in both English and German to describe the figures and animals which animate a picture intended essentially as a landscape or veduta; in other words, figures which are not really essential and could be added by another painter. In the highly specialized world of the Dutch painters of the 17th century this was very often the case, so that a landscape painter like Wynants rarely did his own staffage; whereas Canaletto or Guardi always did. to the interiors.