Jacob Balthasar Peeters

Jacob Balthasar Peeters or Jacob Balthasar Peeters, also known as Jacob Peeters or Jacobus Peeters (Antwerp, 6 January 1661 – 17 December 1732) was a Flemish painter who specialized in architectural paintings depicting imaginary Renaissance and Baroque palaces populated with elegant figures wearing exotic clothes and headgear and shown in theatrical, stage-like postures. Peeters also painted realistic interiors of existing churches with figures.

Life There has been some confusion about the facts of Jacob Balthasar Peeters' life as the name Jacob or Jacobus Peeters was quite common at the time, and there appears to have been at least one other contemporary Jacobus Peeters who was also a painter active in Antwerp. According to the baptismal register of the parish of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Zuid (Our Lady South) in Antwerp, he was baptized on 6 January 1661 as the son of Daniel Peeters and Martina Wauters. He was the third of five children and the only son among his sisters Martina, Joanna Maria, Constantia, and Maria. His father was a sculptor who was registered at the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke as a wijnmeester (son of a master of the guild) in the guild year 1651–1652. His father died when he was only five years old. No family connection to the well-known painters Bonventura and Jan Peeters has been established to date. On 28 May 1683, his mother and the marine and landscape painter Hendrik van Minderhout entered into a one-year contract pursuant to which van Minderhout was to teach Jacob, who was 22 years old at the time, to draw and paint. The contract further stipulated that "He will learn for a year, in the summer from 7am to 6pm, in the winter from 8am until the fall of darkness. He will paint landscapes and staffage. Outside of his working hours he is allowed to draw, sketch and paint after the works of his master, also on Sundays and holidays, for his own profit. The cost is 100 guilder, a possible second term costs 15 Flemish pounds.

Elected in 1695 to serve as dean of the Guild, he preferred to pay the fixed contribution of 360 guilders to be exempted from this charge. He may possibly be identified with the Jacobus Peeters constschilder (painter) who makes together with his wife Barbara Christina Witten a will on 7 June 1699, while living on Kipdorp near the St. James Church. On 1 March 1727, Peeters and his wife purchased the Sint-Cathelijne house in Kipdorp (now known as Sint-Jacobsmarkt) which was adjacent to the cemetery of the St. James Church. If he is the Jacobus Peeter who was the widower of Barbara Christina Witten, he made his will as a widower on 20 November 1753, when he must have been already 92 or 93 years of age. Van Minderhout was a Dutch painter active in Antwerp who often contributed the figures to works by local landscape and perspective painters including Wilhelm Schubert van Ehrenberg. Peeters had also studied with van Minderhout in 1683-1685. A painting depicting the Courtyard of Rubens' House in Antwerp (Buckinghamshire County Museum, Aylesbury) was possibly painted by Jacob Balthasar Peeters or Anton Gunther Gheringh, another architectural painter active in Antwerp.