Jan de Bray

Jan de Bray was one of the leading portrait painters of Haarlem in the generation after Frans Hals, with a clear, cool, smooth style. He is best known for portraits historiés, in which real people, often his own family, pose as figures from history, the Bible or myth, so that a Banquet of Cleopatra or an Adoration of the Magi doubles as a family portrait.

Born in Haarlem around 1627, the son of the painter and architect Salomon de Bray, he spent most of his life there and was long dean of the painters’ guild. He painted group portraits for the city’s institutions and many private sitters, and his double portrait of the printer Abraham Casteleyn and his wife is in the Rijksmuseum. The plague of 1663 and 1664 killed his father and several of his siblings. He later moved to Amsterdam, where he died in 1697.

Allegorical Family Portrait shows the portrait historié at its most personal.