Gerrit Duyckinck

Gerrit Duyckinck was born in 1660 in New Amsterdam, the son of Evert Duyckinck, a portraitist and glazier, and Hendrickje Simons. As a teenager he assisted his father in the glazier trade, but by 1679 he had begun identifying himself as a portrait painter rather than a craftsman. He spent his career working for private patrons in New Amsterdam and Dutch settlements upstate, producing portraits in oil on wood that he consistently left unsigned and undated.

His attributed works include a "Portrait of a Lady" of about 1710 and "Mrs. Augustus Jay" of about 1700, both in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The latter depicts Anna Maria Bayard, grandniece of Peter Stuyvesant, in a pose borrowed from a 1695 mezzotint of the Countess of Essex by John Smith after Sir Godfrey Kneller. Duyckinck died around 1712, yet the family workshop continued through his son Gerardus, who became the most prolific and best-known painter of the Duyckinck dynasty in early colonial New York.