Jan van Pee

Jan van Pee (1630, Amsterdam – 1710, Antwerp), was a Dutch Golden Age art dealer and genre painter.

Biography According to Houbraken he was the son of the Amsterdam art dealer Emanuel van Pee, a man with a title of lower nobility, whose father Justus van Pee of Brussels had been the private secretary of Margaret of Parma. Justus van Pee had been trained as a painter but was too nearsighted for the work. As a private secretary he astonished everyone by being able to read letters in the dark better than anyone else, despite his near-sightedness. Though his father had earned a title, there was little inheritance left for Emanuel when he died, so Emanuel started an art dealership to make a living, and moved to Amsterdam, where Jan van Pee was born and where he starting working for his father at a young age making copies of small cabinet paintings ("Dozynwerk", or "works of a dozen"). When Jan came of age, he married Hendrika Matthysdr in 1657 in Leiden and they had children, but he regretted that he never visited Antwerp to admire the paintings there. Jan van Pee decided to go, but needed money for the trip. when Gerard de Lairesse arrived in 1667. Van Pee also made genre scenes of his own invention, and he is known to have created a number of well-painted oil studies of animals, usually closely grouped on a buff coloured ground.

Van Pee was the teacher of his son Theodor or Dirck van Pee, born in 1669 and the grandfather of the miniature painter Henriëtta van Pee. From 1684 he is registered in the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke with many pupils.