Career
He wrote Lives of the Stadtholders William I and Maurice and Beginning and Ending of the Dutch East India Company, as well as other basic works in the fields of geography, cosmography and astronomy, discovery and traveling He served as Regent of the Huiszitten House in Amsterdam, together with Ferdinand Bol, where their portraits were painted in a regentenstuk in 1675 by Pieter van Anraedt. Anraedt painted his portrait again separately in 1675, and this second portrait looks very similar to an earlier regentenstuk painted by Bol himself in 1657 of the Huiszitten House regents (Commelin has whiskers in both paintings).