Philip Fruytiers

Philip Fruytiers (1610–1666) was a Flemish Baroque painter and engraver. Until the 1960s, he was especially known for his miniature portraits in watercolor and gouache. Since then, several large canvases signed with the monogram PHF have been ascribed to him. These new findings have led to a renewed appreciation for his contribution to the Antwerp Baroque.

Life Details about his life are scarce. He was born in Antwerp on 10 January 1610 as the son of Jan Fruytiers and Catherina Vervloet. He is listed as a pupil at the Jesuit college in Antwerp in 1627. He contributed texts in Latin, French and Dutch to an emblem book published in 1627 by that college at the Joannes Cnobbaert imprint in Antwerp under the title Typus mundi in quo ejus calamitates et pericula nec non divini, humanique amoris antipathia, emblematice proponuntur. The illustrations of this publication were made by Philips van Mallery.

No information about his artistic training is available. He became a master of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke in the guild year 1631–32. He is described in the register of the Guild as an illuminator, painter and engraver. Fruytiers also painted large portraits like that of David Teniers the Younger and group or family portraits such as that of the three children of Rubens.

The accepted view of Philip Fruytiers as principally a miniaturist and watercolorist was based partially on the descriptions in the early biographical works by Cornelis de Bie and Arnold Houbraken.

Although Cornelis de Bie mentioned that Fruytiers also painted altarpieces, the only known works by his hand until the 1960s were works on paper or vellum. As a result, the established view about the nature of his work was not challenged. In the 1960s this view had to be revised, however, when three large paintings of saints dated 1652 with the monogram "PHF" (in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp), which were previously attributed to a hypothetical painter PH Franck, were identified as being by the hand of Fruytiers. This led to the attribution to Fruytiers of other paintings in collections of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp and the Museo del Prado in Madrid, and in the parish church of Gistel, West Flanders. Drawings for some of his altarpieces are kept in the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, the Yale University Art Gallery and the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin.