Gillis Backereel

The artist was principally active in Antwerp where he produced various compositions for the local churches.

[3] Gillis had reportedly a much older brother called Willem Backereel who enjoyed a good reputation as a landscape painter and left young for Rome where he died young.

[4] The early Dutch biographer Arnold Houbraken reported that the Backereel family produced a number of artists and that Joachim von Sandrart mentioned seven or eight Backereel family members that he knew personally.

His Adoration of the Shepherds and Vision of St. Felix are in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels and his Hero mourns the dead Leander in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Backereel provided the design for an engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar representing Bruno of Cologne published in 1649.