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Porcellis, Jan
(b Ghent, before 1584; d Zouterwoude, 1632). Dutch painter, draughtsman and etcher of Flemish origin. His father, Captain Jan Pourchelles or Porcellis, was one of the many Flemish refugees from the renewed Spanish persecutions in 1585 who emigrated to the northern Netherlands. The family settled at Rotterdam, where Jan Porcellis is first recorded on the occasion of his marriage in 1605. He probably started his career as a graphic artist, not a painter, possibly working for the Rotterdam engraver and publisher Jan van Doetechum (d 1630), who published maps, book illustrations and engravings of ship portraits. Through his wife, van Doetechum was related to the English publisher of emblem books Geoffrey Whitney (1548–?1601), which may account for Porcellis’s stay in London, where one of his daughters was born before 1615. Houbraken’s suggestion that he was a pupil of Hendrick Vroom must be discounted. Research has established that two Vroom-like marine paintings (a battle scene and a Storm at Night), in the British Royal Collection since c. 1610 and formerly regarded as the earliest known paintings by Porcellis, are by Vroom. The earliest known secure paintings by Porcellis belong to the 1620s.
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