Gerard de Lairesse. Gerard Lairesse was a Dutch Golden Age painter and art theorist.
His broad range of skills included music, poetry, and theatre. De Lairesse was influenced by the Perugian Cesare Ripa and French classicist painters such as Charles le Brun, Simon Vouet and authors such as Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine.
His importance grew in the period following the death of Rembrandt. His treatises on painting and drawing, Grondlegginge Ter Teekenkonst, based on geometry and Groot Schilderboek, were highly influential on 18th-century painters.
De Lairesse was born in Liège and was the second son of painter Renier de Lairesse. He studied art under his father and from 1655 under Bertholet Flemalle.
He worked in Cologne and Aix-la-Chapelle for Maximilian Henry of Bavaria from 1660. In 1664 De Lairesse fled from Liège after an affair with two sisters, his models, led to difficulties. He travelled north with a girl named Marie Salme and married her in Visé. The couple settled in Utrecht, where a son was baptized in April 1665. When his talent as an artist was discovered by the art dealer Gerrit van Uylenburgh, he moved to Amsterdam. De Lairesse arrived with his violin, with which he impressed Jan van Pee and probably Anthonie Claesz de Grebber in Uylenburgh's studio. In 1670 a son, Abraham, was born; the engraver Abraham Blooteling, with whom he collaborated, was the witness at the baptism; anothe