Birth Year : 1620
Death Year : 1690
Country :
Abraham van Beyeren, known for his rich still lives, was born in The
Hague and worked successively in Leyden, The Hague, Amsterdam, Goude and
Ouerschie, where he died in 1690. In 1640, while in The Hague, he was one
of the founders of that city's Painters Guild, and the following year he
was admitted to the Delft Guild. Little is known of the personal details
of van Beyeren's life. We do know that while in Leyden, van Beyeren was
influenced by the still-life painter, de Heen, who painted in the Baroque
style of still life with its compositions of fruit and precious vases often
set in the shadow of pillars and drapery against a landscape background.
The University of Leyden also fostered another form of still life painting
with which van Beyeren experimented-Vanitas-whose subject matter was concerned
with the morality of man and whose symbolic objects were stern reminders
of the natural decay of all things and the vanity of human desires.
It was while he was painting in The Hague, the happiest and most successful
years of his career, that van Beyeren achieved that style for which he
is best known today. The Hague, with its nearby fishing village of Scheveningen,
favored those lavish displays of seafood, which exactly suited the dashing,
almost impressionistic techniques of an artist who was unsurpassed in recreating
the iridescent sheen of fish and other creatures of the sea. Van Beyeren's
later work was concerned with sumptuous still lives of fine chinaware and
choice foods set in warm translucent backgrounds. The modernism of his
technique, with its use of bravura lighting, was not, however, always to
the liking of a clientele of rich bourgeoisie, who regarded illusionist
realism and linear exactitude as the supreme achievement in art.
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Abraham van Beyeren
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