He roamed the seas with the Dutch Navy in his youth, working as a surgeon. Tradition says that the ships on which he sailed skirted the coast of Africa. When he came to New York, about 1718, it was from the island of Curacao.

Portrait painting brought him a certain amount of fame but he also was a writer of hymns, a land speculator and a musician.

It was while singing in church that he made the acquaintance of his second wife Geertry Vas, the daughter of Dominie Petrus Vas, whose church Pieter attended.

His birth date is in question, either 1682 or 1687 being considered. Holland was his country of birth but the exact whereabouts has not been determined. There were van der Lijns in Amsterdam and Alkmaar at the time Pieter lived but no record of his presence has been found.

On his arrival in New York in 1718 he married Geertje Vandenberg. Both she and their first child died when the child was born. After his move to Kingston he married Miss Vas who bore him six children.

The paintings which experts were positive were painted by him are now in considerable doubt. The one on which all agreed, that of his mother-in-law, is now thought to be the work of another artist.

Herbert Cutler of the Senate House Museum in Kingston reports, "As for the theory on what pictures were painted by Pieter Vanderlyn there is still no firm conclusion. Mary Black of the New York Historical Society has been doing a great deal of research and is about to make some pronouncements. She feels that Pieter is the Van Gansevort limner."

The best Pieter Vanderlyn story I have come across is the following from American Painting — First Flowers of Our Wilderness by James Flexner: 'After he traveled the roads of peace for more than sixty years, Mars caught him up again. The British burnt Kingston in 1777, and the nonagenarian was forced to flee; he walked 28 miles to the home of a son, and lived another year to tell the tale. He died in 1778."

Actually, Mars, Roman God of War, had not completely ignored him. In The History of Ulster County, a Peter Vanderline is listed on the muster roll of a 2nd Co. of foot of the Corporation of Kingston in 1738.

Where Pieter is buried is another mystery. The grave of his son Jacobus in Shawangunk (his destination on that long walk) is marked with a plain fieldstone with the initials JVL, but there is no indication that Pieter is buried there too.

Whether he was the De Peyster painter, or the Van Gansevort limner, born in 1682 or 1687, a sailor or a surgeon, he was our common grandfather, and an uncommon man indeed.