Jan de Bray Allegorical Family Portrait ca. 1665-70 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
Jan de Bray Banquet of Cleopatra (Portrait of the de Bray Family) 1652 oil on canvas Royal Collection, Great Britain |
Jan de Bray Banquet of Cleopatra (Portrait of the de Bray Family) 1669 oil on canvas Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire |
The second version of the Banquet of Cleopatra was painted more as a family memorial, most of the artist's relatives from the original 1652 version having died in the plague of 1663-64.
Jan de Bray Portrait of a Couple as Penelope and Ulysses 1668 oil on canvas Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky |
Jan de Bray Portrait of the printer Abraham Casteleyn and his wife Margarieta 1663 oil on canvas Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
Jan de Bray Regents of the Pest House in Haarlem 1667 oil on canvas Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem |
Jan de Bray Governors of the Guild of Saint Luke, Haarlem 1675 oil on canvas Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
Jan de Bray Family Group Portrait of a Boy aged eleven 1663 oil on panel Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh |
Jan de Bray Family Group Portrait of a Boy aged seven 1663 oil on panel Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh |
Jan de Bray Family Group Portrait of a Father 1662 oil on panel Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh |
Jan de Bray Family Group Portrait of a Mother 1663 oil on panel Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh |
Jan de Bray Suffer the Little Children to come unto Me (Family Portrait of Pieter Braems, Emmerentia van der Laen and their Children) 1663 drawing Morgan Library, New York |
Jan de Bray Suffer the Little Children to come unto Me (Family Portrait of Pieter Braems, Emmerentia van der Laen and their Children) 1663 oil on panel Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem |
Jan de Bray Musical Group surrounded by Putti 1652 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
Jan de Bray Violin Player with Two Young Singers 1658 oil on canvas private collection |
"Tragedy struck the family when both of Jan's parents and four of his siblings died in a plague that ravaged Haarlem from 1663 to 1664. Jan suffered further personal losses when each of his three marriages ended in the untimely death of his wife, all of whom shared the artist's Catholic faith. . . . Despite the tragedies of his personal life, De Bray pursued a successful artistic career in Haarlem, where he was named dean of the Saint Luke's Guild several times in the 1670s and 1680s. He was one of the foremost Dutch artists working in the classical tradition, a style of painting in Holland that fused naturalism with ideals of beauty that originated in antiquity. De Bray was also an architect and an inventor, but he was foremost a painter of portraits and historical subjects. Often he blended these two genres in what is known as the portrait historié, or historicized portrait. Works of this type portrayed contemporary individuals in the guise of figures from the Bible, mythology, or ancient history and literature, thereby drawing parallels between the virtues of the sitters and those of the historical personages."
– from biographical sketch at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC