Griffier, John

, a landscape painter, born at Amsterdam in 1645, was a pupil of Roland Roghman, whose manner he relinquished after he became acquainted with the more perfect one of A. Vandervelde and Lingelbach. | He settled in England, and made views of many of the principal places, which are highly wrought, but with rather an artificial tone of colouring. His execution was minute and laboured, but his pictures are very well completed in that style. He likewise employed his talents in imitations of Rembrandt, Rysdael, Polemburg, and Teniers; and so successfully, that his productions are often taken for originals. He died in the seventy-third year of his age, in 1718. He was known by the appellation of the old Griffier.-^-His son, Robert Griffier, or the young Griffier, practised the same profession as his father, and in the same style. He resided chierly upon the continent, and produced a great number of elaborate pictures of views on the Rhine, &c. with many figures in them. He was alive in 1713. ¹