Vos

Vos is the Dutch for fox, and the Meertens Instituut sets out four separate roads by which it became a surname. It could be taken from an estate or a house called Vos. It could be a metaphorical byname for a man who put people in mind of the animal, by cunning or by red hair. It could mark a hunter, for what he chased. Or it could be a patronymic, from a forename Vos or Fosse. Four origins, one spelling, and no way for most families to know which is theirs.

The colour sense was alive in ordinary speech and still is: in Dutch a vos is also a horse with a red-brown coat, the word for a chestnut in the stable. Van den vos Reynaerde, the beast epic of the Low Countries, then put an edge on it. Reinaert de Vos was the great trickster of Dutch and Flemish storytelling, and calling a man the fox measured him against a character everybody knew.

In 2007 the plain form Vos was carried by 30,279 people in the Netherlands, the fifteenth commonest surname in the country, densest at Aalburg, where 4.40 per cent of the population answered to it. In Belgium the bare form is scarce, 3,862 bearers in 2008, but the version with the article is not: De Vos was the nineteenth commonest Belgian surname in 2020, heaviest in East Flanders, with about ten thousand bearers in Belgium and ten thousand more across the border in the Netherlands. The spelling then splits by country. Belgians write the capital, and often run it into one word as Devos; the Dutch write a small d, their few capitalised exceptions clustering in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen. Emigrant families in the United States produced a third form, DeVos in camel case.

The first bearer who can be dated to the day is a friar. Hendrik Vos, whose name is also written Voes, belonged to the Augustinian priory at Antwerp that now stands as St Andrew's Church. In 1522 the whole house publicly professed Lutheran doctrine, and the Bishop of Cambrai had every friar arrested and shut up at Vilvoorde, to be interrogated by the Flemish inquisitor Jacob van Hoogstraten. Faced with burning, all recanted except three: Vos, Jan van Essen and Lampertus Thorn. Those who gave way were released and defrocked.

The three who held were condemned and handed to the secular arm. Thorn asked for four more days with the scriptures and so was not killed with the others; he was gaoled instead and died there in 1528. Vos was brought before the inquisitors first on the morning of 1 July 1523 and refused. He and van Essen were burned alive on the Grote Markt, and the charges were never read aloud, against settled practice. Luther answered with what is thought to be his first hymn, printed in the Erfurt Enchiridion of 1524.

Amalberga Vos entered the monastery of Ter Hage at Axel, in the County of Flanders and now in the Netherlands, in 1529, and five years later she was its abbess. Nothing is known of her family or where she came from. What is documented is what she built: she enlarged the abbey and its standing considerably, and in 1544 founded a refuge for it in Ghent.

On 24 August 1566, in the Iconoclastic Fury, the Calvinist preacher Caspar van der Heyden called for the purging of her house. The abbess went out and negotiated with the crowd, and the terms she got were that her nuns would not be molested but given safe passage. The abbey was then pillaged. She had its church restored in 1567, and in 1572 took the community to the Ghent refuge she had prepared, dying there on 25 August.

Maerten de Vos was born in Antwerp in 1532, youngest of the four children of Peter de Vos, a painter born at Leiden in 1490 who was a free master of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke by 1519. He trained with his father, then lived in Italy between 1550 and 1558; the biographer Carlo Ridolfi records him in Tintoretto's studio, which would account for the Venetian colour in his work. He came home to a market with no room in it: Frans Floris and his workshop absorbed nearly all the demand for history painting.

The Beeldenstorm of 1566 changed that. Floris watched his own pictures destroyed, never recovered and effectively stopped painting, while the stripped churches needed everything replaced, and of the younger men who stepped into the gap de Vos became the most prominent. He decorated the palatine chapel of William, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg at Celle in 1570 and was dean of the Antwerp guild in 1572. Having converted to the Lutheran faith and reconverted after the Fall of Antwerp, he took the Counter-Reformation work, among it St Luke Painting the Virgin in 1602, replacing a Quinten Metsys destroyed more than twenty years before.

His reach was greater on paper than on panel: he drew 78 illustrations for the Bible Gerard de Jode published in 1585, and roughly 1,600 prints were cut after his designs. One of them, engraved by Adriaen Collaert in 1583, was very likely Rembrandt's source for The Storm on the Sea of Galilee.

Lambert de Vos was admitted to the Guild of St Luke at Mechelen in 1563, and since masters were commonly made at twenty-five he was probably born around 1538. Almost nothing else of his life survives, and what he is remembered for he did abroad. In 1572 he travelled to Constantinople and worked among the Habsburg diplomats there; in 1574 he made a Costume Book for Karel Rijm, ambassador of Emperor Maximilian II to the Sublime Porte. It is now in Bremen, 124 sheets of Genoese paper whose first fifty pages carry the ceremonial procession of Sultan Selim II.

The Freshfield Album at Trinity College, Cambridge, is attributed to him on style and on the 1574 dates some of its sheets carry. Its twenty-one watercolours record the architecture of Constantinople so exactly that the narrative content of the Column of Arcadius can be read from them, though nothing of that column now stands but its base.

Cornelis de Vos, born at Hulst near Antwerp in 1584, and his younger brother Paul moved with their father to Antwerp in 1596 and both trained under the little-known painter David Remeeus. Cornelis joined the Guild of Saint Luke in 1608, called himself an art dealer when he took Antwerp citizenship in 1616, and was dean of the guild in 1619 and high dean in 1620. In 1628 he painted his only known landscape, a View of Hulst, which he gave to his home town, where it hangs in the city hall still.

The family married into the trade rather than out of it. Cornelis married Susanna Cock, half-sister of the painter Jan Wildens, in 1617; his sister Margaretha had married the animal painter Frans Snyders in 1611; Paul, who had probably trained in Snyders's shop, joined the guild late in 1620 and had Rubens stand godfather to a son christened Peter Paul in 1628. Both brothers worked for Rubens on the Torre de la Parada near Madrid between 1636 and 1638, Cornelis on four mythological canvases now in the Prado and Paul on most of the animal scenes.

One detail shows how common the name already was by then. Among the pupils of Cornelis de Vos was the painter Simon de Vos, to whom, the record states plainly, he was not related.

Where the name did run in a line, Dutch practice bolted a second word onto it. Seven men called Vos de Wael appear in the political record between Arnoldus Johannes, born 1787, and Gerardus Antonius Leonardus Maria, who died in 1982, though the record does not set out how each connects to the last. Carel de Vos van Steenwijk, the statesman of 1759 to 1830, carries the same device.

The plain name went to work in the twentieth century. Roosje Vos, 1860 to 1932, was a trade unionist and campaigner for women's rights; Hein Vos, 1903 to 1972, an economist and Labour politician. Aart Vos and his wife Johtje were resistance workers in the Second World War, as was the illustrator Toby Vos, and Ida Vos, 1931 to 2006, was an author. Roelf Vos founded a supermarket chain in Tasmania, Geoffrey Vos is a British judge and Master of the Rolls, and the best known bearer alive races a bicycle, Marianne Vos, born 1987. A word a Low Countries town once threw at one red-haired or quick-witted man now stands fifteenth in the Netherlands.