Pieter Vanderlyn

Pieter Vanderlyn was born in Holland around 1687 and served with the Dutch navy off the coast of Africa before emigrating to colonial New York, likely via Curaçao, around 1718. That same year he married and joined the Dutch Reformed Church, later becoming a naturalized citizen of the English province. He settled in the Hudson River Valley, traveling frequently between Albany and Kingston while supporting himself primarily through land speculation and business ventures rather than painting alone. He married the daughter of Petrus Vas, a Dutch clergyman in Kingston, and his grandson John Vanderlyn would become one of early America's most ambitious history painters. Vanderlyn never signed his paintings, suggesting he viewed himself as an amateur or part-time limner, yet his attributed portraits display a distinctive and consistent hand. Scholar Mary Black proposed in 1969 that Vanderlyn was the anonymous "Gansevoort Limner," an identification accepted by the National Gallery of Art but still questioned by some scholars. The portraits attributed to him—such as Susanna Truax (1730), Young Lady with a Rose (1732), and Young Lady with a Fan (1737)—feature flat, stiff poses, thinly applied paint in earth tones, and telltale details like thin straight lips, small almond-shaped eyes, and large hands with long, articulated fingers. Works attributed to him hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Newark Museum of Art, and the Senate House Historical Site in Kingston, where he lived until the British burned the city during the Revolutionary War, forcing him to flee to Shawangunk, where he died in 1778 at about age ninety-one.