Joos van Craesbeeck was born in Neerlinter (now a village in Flemish Brabant, Belgium). His father was also called Joos and is believed to have been a baker; his mother was Gertruid van Callenborch. In 1630 or 1631 van Craesbeeck married Johanna Tielens. Her father was a baker but her family also counted artists among its members: the landscape painter Jan Tielens was Johanna’s uncle while two of her uncles on her mother's side were the sculptors Melchior and Caspar Grison. The Tielens family was also responsible for operating the bakery in the Antwerp citadel. When the painter Adriaen Brouwer was imprisoned in the citadel for not paying his debts, van Craesbeeck likely got to know him. According to Cornelis de Bie in his book Het Gulden Cabinet, van Craesbeeck became Brouwer's pupil and best friend. Their relationship was described by de Bie as 'Soo d’oude songhen, soo pypen de jonghen' (As the old ones sang, so the young ones chirp'). The stylistic similarities of van Craesbeeck's early work with that of Brouwer seems to corroborate such pupilage.

 

Van Craesbeeck became a master in Antwerp’s Guild of St Luke in 1633–1634 as a baker and painter. In 1637 he was widowed and obtained an inheritance. That same year he is recorded as the owner of a new house with a bakery in Antwerp. From this time onwards he was able to dedicate himself full-time to painting. The movements of van Craesbeek between 1637 and 1651 - the year he became master in the Brussels Guild of Saint Luke - are not clear. It is likely that his move to Brussels was linked to that of David II Teniers, who settled in Brussels on 7 September 1650. In 1653, Adriaen Rombouts was registered as his pupil. According to the artist biographer Jacob Campo Weyerman, Daniël Boone was also his pupil but there is no archival evidence to support this. The death date of van Craesbeeck is not known with certainty but it must be situated between 1660 and 1661 since in 1660 a Lucas Viters was registered as his pupil at the Guild and a year later Cornelis de Bie reported him as deceased.

 

Van Craesbeeck painted mainly genre scenes and a few religiously themed compositions, as well as a few tronies. His genre scenes depict low-life figures as well as scenes of middle-class people. The chronology of his work is difficult to establish since only one painting, the now missing Self-portrait in front of a Mirror, is signed. Very few drawings by his hand have survived; a group of four drawings however is kept at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg (inv./cat. nos. 21816, 21817, 21815 and 21814). The present work is a beautiful example of van Craesbeeck's tronies (imagined head studies), painted very quickly and expressively with loose brushstrokes, applied wet-in-wet. The picture is very close to another tronie of the same face, of comparable dimensions, by van Craesbeeck (oil on panel, 46 x 38 cm, present whereabouts unknown,  ill. 1).