Olfert de Vrij

With Bob Haboldt & Co., New York, by 2001;
From whom acquired by the present owner. 

The panel is uncradled. The surface is clean and the painting is presentable as is. Overall there is very nice retention of the detail throughout. Examination under UV light reveals numerous very finely done retouches throughout much of the composition, mainly concentrated in the sky. The ships and water in foreground have fewer. These restorations have been very skillfully applied and there is no need for further work. In a faux ebony wood frame.
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In addition to the present picture, only two additional works by De Vrij are known, and they are both similarly executed en grisaille. His only dated work is a similarly signed panel of 1665 in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; the other a picture sold Amsterdam, Christie’s, 16 November 2006, lot 110 (as Attributed to de Vrij). Despite his limited corpus, the artist displays a consistent technique and compositional approach to marine picture making in all of three of these works.

Olfert de Vrij was a leading figure in Hoorn and was an active participant in local government. He is not recorded in any official guild lists, and thus must have painted merely as a hobby, thus perhaps explaining his limited output. Similar to his fellow marine artists from Hoorn, Caspar van den Bos and Pieter Coopse, he set himself apart from more traditional penschilders by his use of a fine brush to create his pictures, instead of an ink-filled pen. Therefore despite its initial appearance as a penschilderij, we may understand this painting better as a painting en grisaille. Such an atypical technique, executed by working up varying shades of thinly applied grey oil paint, was a typical for artists from Hoorn.