John Verelst, born and known also as Johannes or Jan (29 October 1648 – 7 March 1734), was a Dutch Golden Age painter. He was the youngest of three sons of the painter

Pieter Hermansz Verelst Pieter Harmensz Verelst (c. 1618, Dordrecht – c. 1678 in Dordrecht or Hulst) was a Dutch Golden Age painter. Three of his sons, Simon, Herman, and Johannes Verelst, also became painters. Biography Pieter Verelst was a pupil of Gerard Dou and ...

; all became known as painters. He is known for his portraits, especially of the men known as the

Four Mohawk Kings The Four Indian Kings or Four Kings of the New World were three Mohawk chiefs from one of the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy and a Mahican of the Algonquian peoples, whose portraits were painted by Jan Verelst in London to commemorat ...

, who visited Queen Anne in 1710 from the Province of New York in North America. (One of these men has since been identified correctly instead as a chief of the

Mohican The Mohican ( or , alternate spelling: Mahican) are an Eastern Algonquian Native American tribe that historically spoke an Algonquian language. As part of the Eastern Algonquian family of tribes, they are related to the neighboring Lenape, who ...

, a different tribe.)

Biography

Johannes Verelst was born in

The Hague The Hague ( ; nl, Den Haag or ) is a city and municipality of the Netherlands, situated on the west coast facing the North Sea. The Hague is the country's administrative centre and its seat of government, and while the official capital o ...

as the youngest son of

, a painter, and his wife. His older brothers were Simon and Herman. All three of these sons became painters, studying with their father from when they were young. After becoming established, Johannes Verelst migrated to London in 1691, where he specialized in oil portraits and became known as John Verelst. Due to Simon using a slanting "S" in his signatures, flower still lifes in the manner of Simon Verelst are sometimes attributed to Johannes, while some of Johannes' portraits are attributed to Simon.Johannes Verelst
''

RKD The Netherlands Institute for Art History or RKD (Dutch: RKD-Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis), previously Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD), is located in The Hague and is home to the largest art history center i ...

Mohawk Kings

To seal a treaty with the British, four Indigenous delegates (called "Indian kings" by the British)--three Haudenosaunee and one Anishinaabe--visited

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

in 1710. Queen Anne was so impressed by these tall, muscular foreign visitors that she had Verelst paint oilcolors of them in 1710 (see

). This was one of the first paintings of

aboriginal people Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original people ...

. The chiefs had come voluntarily and were well treated as diplomats and entertained. They were ''Tee Yee Neen Ho Ga Row'' (Hendriks), Emperor of the Six Nations; ''Ho Nee Yeath Taw No Row'' (John), King of Generethgarich; ''Sa Ga Yeath Qua Pieth Tow'' (Brant) of the Maquas; he was the grandfather of Joseph Brant, a chief during the Revolutionary War and namesake for

Brantford, Ontario Brantford ( 2021 population: 104,688) is a city in Ontario, Canada, founded on the Grand River in Southwestern Ontario. It is surrounded by Brant County, but is politically separate with a municipal government of its own that is fully indepen ...

; and ''Etow Oh Koam'' (Nicholas), King of the River Nation. They had been persuaded to come to England by Peter Schuyler, acting Governor of New York in 1709 and some-time mayor of Albany. They stayed one month and returned without having contracted any of the endemic European diseases. The four portraits were later transformed into mezzotint prints by artists, including Anglo-French printmaker John Simon (1675–1751), and sold widely. The four portraits of these First Nations chiefs were displayed at Kensington Palace until 1977, when Queen Elizabeth gave them to the Library and Archives Canada. They were featured on a Canadian postage stamp in 2010.Canada Post, ''details/en détail'', vol. 19, no. 2 (April–June 2010), pp. 10-11.

Family tree

References

External links

See also Richmond P. Bond, ''Queen Anne's American Kings'' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). Laura Brandon,
War Art in Canada: A Critical History
' (Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2021). {{DEFAULTSORT:Verelst, John 1648 births 1734 deaths Dutch Golden Age painters Dutch male painters Artists from The Hague