Aert de Gelder

Gelder, Aert (Arent) de 

Born Oct. 26, 1645, in Dordrecht; died there Aug. 25, 1727. Dutch painter.

Gelder studied first in Dordrecht under S. van Hoogstraaten (about 1660) and later in Amsterdam under Rembrandt, whose last and most faithful pupil he became. His works in the 1670’s are democratic in spirit and are characterized by the emotional vividness of his subjects. His range of saturated browns and olives is accented with violet and orange hues (Ecce Homo, 1671, the Dresden Picture Gallery; Entrance to the Temple, 1679, the Mauritshuis, The Hague; and The Wandering Musician, the Hermitage, Leningrad). His paintings in the 1680’s and 1690’s, such as Lot and His Daughters (the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow), have an exotic elegance and sensitiveness and show delicacy in texture and color effects. In his later series of paintings of the Lord’s Passion, painted about 1715 (Aschaffenburg, Amsterdam, and Munich museums), fantastic and subjectivistic elements are found.

REFERENCE

Lilienfeld, K. Arent de Gelder, sein Leben and seine Werke. The Hague, 1914.