Simon de Vos

Simon de Vos (20 October 1603 – 15 October 1676) was a Flemish painter, draughtsman and art collector. He started his career making small-format cabinet pictures of genre scenes, in particular of Caravaggesque merry companies. Later he switched to history painting, working on larger formats in a Flemish Baroque style which was influenced by Rubens and van Dyck.

Life Simon de Vos was born in Antwerp as the son of the dice maker Herman de Vos and Elisabeth van Oppen.

At only 12 years old de Vos started his art studies in 1615 with the eminent portrait painter Cornelis de Vos (1584–1651), to whom he was not related. Upon completion of his training in 1620, he became at the young age of 17 a master in Antwerp's Guild of Saint Luke. In addition, on the basis of the attribution to Simon de Vos of a 1626 composition referred to as Gathering of Smokers and Drinkers (Louvre Museum, Paris) it is believed that de Vos resided in Aix-en-Provence in France in the mid-1620s.

De Vos must have returned to his hometown in 1626 as in that year he married Catharina van Utrecht, a sister of the Antwerp still life painter Adriaen van Utrecht. The couple remained childless. De Vos was successful financially. When his wife died in 1670 he possessed four properties in Antwerp and owned a collection of 290 paintings.

Between 1629 and 1649 he received 6 pupils. Garland paintings are a special type of still life developed in Antwerp by Jan Brueghel the Elder in collaboration with the Italian cardinal Federico Borromeo at the beginning of the 17th century. The genre was initially connected to the visual imagery of the Counter-Reformation movement. Garland paintings typically show a flower garland around a devotional image, portrait or other religious symbol (such as the host). Garland paintings were usually collaborations between a still life painter and a figure painter.