Jacob Ferdinand Voet

[2] He was one of the fifteen children; his older brother Carlo moved to Amsterdam and married in 1661 a daughter of the wealthy Joan Coymans and Sophia Trip.

Voet drew a picture in charcoal of all the members of the Bentvueghels on the white-washed wall of an inn in Rome that was a popular meeting place of this group.

[5] In Rome Voet's skills as a portrait painter were much in demand at the Papal court and by the Roman aristocracy, including the prominent Colonna and Odescalchi families.

In 1671–1672 Voet received a commission from Cardinal Chigi to paint portraits of young woman who were prominent in Roman society.

He was banned from the city by Pope Innocent XI who was scandalized by Voet's portraits of women portrayed with unseemly décolleté.

[2] According to the 18th century biographer Arnold Houbraken, Voet set out on his return journey to Antwerp from Turin together with the Dutch painter Jan van Bunnik, whom he had already met in Rome in the company of Cornelis Bloemaert.

He left his hometown for Paris at some time between 1684 and 1686, was appointed as court painter and died there in 1689,[2] living on Quai de Guénégaud.

Voet specialized in half-length portraits, in which all attention is concentrated on the subject, who emerges from a neutral, dark background.

[2] It is likely that the works of the portrait painters Carlo Maratta (1625–1713) and Pierre Mignard (1612–1695) who were active in Rome at the same time as Voet inspired the comparable elegance of his style, which he combined with the Flemish attention to detail.

Garland paintings are a special type of still life developed in Antwerp by artists such as Jan Brueghel the Elder, Hendrick van Balen, Frans Francken the Younger, Peter Paul Rubens and Daniel Seghers.

The Roman publisher Giovanni Giacomo Rossi included Voet's portraits of Cardinals in the publication Effigies Cardinalium nunc viventum.