Pieter Thijs Biography
Pieter Thys (also Thijs or Tyssens) (Antwerp, 1624 – 1677) was a Flemish painter. Pupil of Artus Deurweerders in 1636, free master in Antwerp in 1644-1645 and dean of the guild in 1660, he also worked in Brussels, then in Holland as painter to the governor Leopold Wilhelm of Austria. He was directly inspired by Rubens and Anton van Dyck in the numerous religious paintings, preserved in Belgium in the churches of St. James in Antwerp, St. Peter in Leuven, of the Virgin in Dendermonde, in the parish church of Arc-et-Serans (Madonna with Child and devotees ). Other paintings of a religious nature are preserved in museums: Apparition of the Virgin to Saint William, Antwerp Saint Benedict martyr, Brussels Saint Sebastian consoled by angels, Ghent Conversion of Saint Hubert, Ghent Thys executed the cartoons for tapestries based on designs by J. van Hoecke , currently in Vienna, among which we remember Day and Night. A famous portraitist, he imitated van Dyck's elegant formula in his portraits of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, now in Vienna at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, by F. Diericx, abbot of the Saint Salvatore, now in the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels and even more so in the Portrait of David Téniers the Younger in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.
