Career
According to Houbraken, who repeated the information from Joachim von Sandrart"s Teutsche Academie, Willem Backereel was from a large painting family that always had a few brothers in Rome. Willem"s brother Gillis Backereel lived with him in Rome, but returned to Antwerp, where he later died. Both brothers were known as landscape painters.
His Roman sketches of the Flavian Palace are similar to works by Cornelis van Poelenburch, January Asselijn and Jacob de Heusch.