Gillis Backereel
Flemish painter
Gillis Backereel (1572 or 1610/1612 – between 1654 and 1662) was a Flemish painter of history subjects. The artist was principally active in Antwerp where he produced various compositions for the local churches as well as mythological compositions.
Life
Details about the life of Gillis Backereel are sketchy and disputed. It was traditionally believed that he was born in Antwerp in 1572 or at the end of the 16th century. It is more likely that he was born c. 1610-1612 since the artist was recorded in Rome as being 24 years old both in 1634 and in 1636. It is possible that the birth dates of two artists with the same name who were possibly relatives of different generations (father and son?) have been mixed up. The Dutch art historian Godefridus Johannes Hoogewerff identified an 'Egidio de Bacchare' who lived on Strada Paolina in Rome and was buried in the cemetery of Campo Santo on 7 September 1626 with Gillis Backereel. Possibly this Egidio was the elder namesake.
The early Dutch biographer Arnold Houbraken reported that the Backereel family produced a number of artists and that Joachim von Sandrart mentioned seven or eight artists from the Backereel family that he knew personally.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gillis Backereel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.