BLEKER, Dirck Gerritsz - b. ~1621 Haarlem, d. ~1679 Den Haag

Dirck Gerritsz Bleker (Bleecker, Bliecker), Dutch painter. He was the only son of the Catholic Haarlem painter Gerrit Claesz Bleker. He was probably taught by his father, who was a painter of biblical subjects, cavalry battles and landscapes.

The Bleker family moved to Amsterdam in the latter half of the 1640s. Dirck was officially registered as a burgher on 29 January 1652. In 1658, he and his two sisters (their parents had died in 1656 and 1657) were living on the Keizersgracht near the corner of the Leliegracht.

Dirck painted a Mary Magdalene in Amsterdam in 1648 or 1649 as a commission for Bartholomeus Blijdenberch. Maria Jonas, alias Maria de la Motte, who was reputed to be a woman of easy virtue and who modelled for him on several occasions, posed for the painting. Bleker wrote two letters to Constantijn Huygens in The Hague during this period, one on 4 September and the second on 13 December 1649, concerning a commission for Prince William II. On 6 October 1650, a month before the stadholder’s death, Dirck received the substantial fee of 1,700 guilders for ‘a naked Venus’ (een naecte Venus), which inspired a poem by Vondel.

Like many other painters in his day, Dirck was also an art dealer. Dirck divided his time between Amsterdam and Heemstede, probably from the time his father bought the homestead in 1653. But in 1662, four years before the property was sold, he left Amsterdam to return to Haarlem. He had accepted a commission in 1666 to ‘paint a portrait of Abraham van der Schalcken and his wife and children’, who lived in Haarlem. Dirck subsequently returned to settle in Amsterdam.

Dirck was still living in Amsterdam on 10 April 1671 but had moved to The Hague by November of that year. The date and circumstances of Dirck Bleker’s death are unknown.