Who is Pieter Vanderlyn?

Pieter Vanderlyn (c. 1687 – 1778) was an American colonial painter.

Pieter Vanderlyn was born in Holland, in about 1687, studied in Amsterdam, and served later than the Dutch navy off the coast of Africa probably as a surgeon. From here he went to Curaçao previously moving upon to reach in New York in 1718. In this year he married Gerretje Van de Berg, who bore him a daughter the considering year, but both died immediately afterwards. Four years later, he married Geertruy Vas, daughter of Petrus Vas, a Dutch clergyman past a congregation in Kingston, New York. He made his full of beans as a portrait painter, land traveler and in additional trades, travelling frequently in the company of Kingston and Albany and residing at various become old in each city.

His paintings were completed in the midst of 1730 and 1745 and were anything unsigned, though some bore an inscription. Analysis of these inscriptions, together with new sources, enabled Mary Black in 1969 to identify Vanderlyn as the “Gansevoort Limner,” an on the other hand unidentified portrait painter of this era, though the attribution remains controversial. There are works by Vanderlyn in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Newark Museum of Art, the New-York Historical Society, the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Chrysler Museum of Art.

Vanderlyn was energetic in Kingston during the American Revolutionary War until British forces burned the city on October 13, 1777. This event forced him to make off to his church and family’s impromptu house in Marbletown, where he died the gone year. The painter John Vanderlyn and lawyer Henry Van Der Lyn were his grandsons.