Jan Victors was baptised in Amsterdam on 13 June 1619. He was a son of the Antwerp native Louis Victor, who is identified in documents as a "spaensche stoelmaker" and later "bode op Dordrecht", and Styntge Jaspers, the daughter of an Amsterdam city musician. His stepbrother was the game-bird painter Jacobus Victors (1640-1705). For stylistic reasons, Jan Victors is numbered among Rembrandt's pupils, where his training would have fallen in the second half of the 1630s. Dated paintings range from 1640 to 1670. In February 1642 he became engaged in Amsterdam to Jannetje Bellaerts, who died in 1661, leaving him with seven children. Around 1668 he rented a house on the Leidsche Straat for 220 gulden and the arrangement that a painting worth sixty gulden would be delivered annually. In late November 1673 he proposed signing on as a 'sieckentrooster' (layman who preached sermons on ships and tended the sick) in the service of the East India Company on ''t Wapen von Rotterdam', a ship that was captured by the English in December 1674 near the Shetland Islands. In 1676 Victors sailed as a 'sieckentrooster' on the 'Rammetjes' from Amsterdam to East India, where he died in 1683 at the latest. His children, including Victor Victors, who is known as a painter only from documents, settled abroad. Jan Victors worked mainly as a history and genre painter, but a few portraits and figural works are also known. His generally large-format histories, influenced by the young Rembrandt and his teacher Pieter Lastman, mainly deal with classical subjects, as well as rather obscure episodes from the Old Testament which were rarely adopted by painters. His rustic genre scenes, reminiscent of Jan Miense Molenaer, are as a rule set under an open sky. These were produced in the 1650s, as were the majority of his portraits.
