Joost van Geel

Joost van Geel (1631, Rotterdam – 1698, Rotterdam), was a Dutch Golden Age genre painter in the style of Gabriel Metsu.

According to Jacob Houbraken, he was never able to discover more about this painter than what he learned from a painting of a lady with a nanny and child, which he described thus: "A piece has come to my attention signed V. Geel, which shows a nanny with a child on her lap, and a mother standing at her side with a red "sulp" jacket edged in white fur quite cleverly wrapped around her, and a yellow satin skirt with natural folds, playing with the child, as if she wanted to tempt her from her nanny with a lump of sugar.

I don't know if this artist was a pupil of Metzu, but the piece was so cleverly done in his manner that it could be taken for a work by his hand.

[2] According to the RKD, he was a pupil of Metsu and worked in Leiden, Germany, France, London, and Rijnsburg before returning to Rotterdam sometime after 1666.

[3] Van Geel's painting of a lacemaker wearing a similar red "sulp" jacket was recently discovered and broadcast on the Dutch antiques television program "Tussen Kunst en Kitsch" in 2011 and valued at around 250,000 euro.