Pieter de Grebber (1600-1652) - Mary Magdalene

This painting, with its remarkable level of execution, certainly fits into Pieter de Grebber's oeuvre. Its disarming naturalism, the smooth, almost silky appearance of the surface, with its fine diagonal brushstrokes, are all characteristic features of the artist.

Pieter de Grebber, together with Salomon de Bray, was a pioneer of Dutch Classicism in Haarlem. Both painters were pupils of Hendrik Goltzius, who is considered the founding father of this school. Although De Grebber never went to Italy, Goltzius made a trip there in 1590, where he must have encountered the latest innovations Annibale Carracci had introduced in Rome towards the end of the century. The artist’s father, Frans Pietersz. de Grebber, was a painter and art dealer, who acted as Rubens's agent in negotiations with Sir Dudley Carleton, English Ambassador to The Hague. De Grebber accompanied his father to Antwerp in 1618, where he may have met Rubens and whose classical art was certainly a factor in the formation of his style. De Grebber was praised as an important painter especially of histories, in the description of Haarlem by Samuel Ampzing (1628) and Petrus Scriverius (1648) and in Philips Angel's 1642 treatise on painting. In 1649, the artist published his own Eleven Rules of Art on a single broadside.

De Grebber was a highly regarded painter who received commissions from the Stadtholder Frederick Hendrik and was among the artists charged with decorating the Oranjezaal of Huis ten Bosch in The Hague with monumental paintings. However, the majority of his oeuvre, approximately 70 works in all, is religious in nature. Having grown up in the Catholic faith, De Grebber maintained close ties with prominent members of the Church in Haarlem, for whom he painted altarpieces for the so-called hidden churches, or ‘huiskerken’, as well as for Catholic churches in Flanders.